A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY

A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY

TWENTIETH-
CENTURY
GLOBAL
CHRISTIANITY

PRAISE FOR THIS SERIES

“The concept of this peoples history’ represents a virtual revolution in the writing of
Christian history, a change that means something dynamic, something that should draw the
attention of many who do not think of themselves as likers of history.... These stories may
come up from the basement of church history, but news about their existence deserves to be
shouted from the housetops.”
MARTIN E. MARTY, University of Chicago Divinity School

“Hidden for centuries by their anonymity and illiteracy, the people of God—the body of
Christ, the church!—are finally having their story told, and by some of todays finest histo¬
rians of the church. The saints, bishops, and theologians of traditional histories can now be
placed against the panoramic and fascinating backdrop of the lived religion of ordinary men
and women of faith. Highly recommended.”
MARK U. EDWARDS JR., Harvard Divinity School
 A PEOPLE'S HISTORY Of CHRISTIANITY
Denis R. Janz
General Editor

Editorial Advisory Board

Sean Freyne, Trinity College, Dublin Elizabeth Clark, Duke University
Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Brown University Bernard McGinn, University of Chicago
Charles Lippy, University of Tennessee, Chattanooga Steven E. Ozment, Harvard University
Rosemary Radford Ruether, Pacific School of Religion

Volume 1
CHRISTIAN ORIGINS
Richard Horsley, editor

Volume l
LATE ANCIENT CHRISTIANITY
Virginia Burrus, editor

Volume 3
BYZANTINE CHRISTIANITY
Derek Krueger, editor

Volume 4
MEDIEVAL CHRISTIANITY
Daniel E. Bornstein, editor

Volume 5
REFORMATION CHRISTIANITY
Peter Matheson, editor

Volumes
MODERN CHRISTIANITY TO 1900
Amanda Porterfield, editor

Volume 1
TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY
Mary Farrell Bednarowski, editor
APEOPIE'S HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY
Volume 1

TWENTIETH-
CENTURY
GLOBAL
CHRISTIANITY

MARY FARRELL BEDNAROWSKI

Editor

FORTRESS PRESS
Minneapolis
TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY
A Peoples History of Christianity, Volume 7

First paperback edition copyright © 2010 Fortress Press, an imprint of Augsburg

Fortress. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no
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write to Permissions, Augsburg Fortress, Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440.

Unless otherwise noted, scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version
Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council
of the Churches of Christ in the USA and used by permission. All rights reserved.

Cover images: © George Doyle / Getty Images, © Plush Studios / Getty Images, © Carole
Gomez / iStockphoto.
Cover design: Laurie Ingram
Book design: James Korsmo

Further materials on this volume and the entire series can be found online at
www.peopleshistoryofchristianity.com.

ISBN 978-0-8006-9725-9

The Library of Congress cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Twentieth-century global Christianity / edited by Mary Farrell Bednarowski.

p. cm. — (A people’s history of Christianity ; v. 7)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8006-3417-9 (alk. paper)
1. Christianity—20th century. I. Bednarowski, Mary Farrell.
BR479.T84 2008
270.8'2—dc22
2007045636

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI Z329.48-1984.

Manufactured in Canada
14 13 12 11 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
 CONTENTS

Contributors vii

Illustrations xiii

General Editor’s Foreword xvii

Denis R. Janz

Introduction Multiplicity and Ambiguity 1

Mary Farrell Bednarowski

Part 1. The Authority of New Voices

Chapter One Filipino Popular Christianity 37
Eleazar S. Fernandez

Chapter Two Rural Southern Black

Women in the United States 61
Rosetta E. Ross

Chapter Three African Women Theologians 83

Mercy Amba Oduyoye

Chapter Four Hispanic Women: Being Church in the U.S.A. 107

Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz

Part 2. Traditions and Transformations

Chapter Five Orthodoxy under Communism 131

Paul Mojzes

Chapter Six Evangelicalism in North America 157

Mark A. Noll and Ethan R. Sanders

v
VI CONTENTS

Chapter Seven Pentecostal Transformation in Latin America 190

Luis N. Rivera-Pagan

Chapter Eight Apocalypticism in the United States 211

Bruce David Forbes

Chapter Nine Catholics in China 231

Jean-Paul Wiest

Chapter Ten Existential Ritualizing in Postmodern Sweden 245

Valerie DeMarinis

Part 3. Innovation and Authenticity

Chapter Eleven Ordinary Christians and the Holocaust 265

Victoria J. Barnett

Chapter Twelve Ecumenism of the People 280

Patrick Henry

Chapter Thirteen Gender and Twentieth-Century Christianity 307

Margaret Bendroth

Chapter Fourteen Canadian Workers and Social Justice 327

Oscar Cole-Arnal

Chapter Fifteen Popular Catholic Sexual Ethics 351

Cristina L. H. Traina

Chapter Sixteen Life and Death in Middle America 377

Ann M. Pederson

Notes 401

Index 431
 CONTRIBUTORS

Victoria J. Barnett is Staff Director of Church Relations at the United

States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She is also one of the general edi¬
tors of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, the English translation series
of Bonhoeffer s complete works being published by Fortress Press. She
is the author of For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest against
Hitler (Oxford University Press, 1992) and Bystanders: Conscience and
Complicity during the Holocaust (Greenwood, 1999). She is the editor/
translator of Wolfgang Gerlachs And the Witnesses Were Silent: The
Confessing Church and the Jews (University of Nebraska Press, 2000)
and the new revised edition of Eberhard Bethges Dietrich Bonhoeffer:
A Biography (Fortress Press, 2000).

Mary Farrell Bednarowski is Professor Emerita of Religious Studies

at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities, Minnesota. Her
teaching, research, and writing interests have focused on encounters
between religion and culture in American religious history with par¬
ticular interest in theological creativity and innovation in womens
religious writings, new religions, literature, and religious autobiog¬
raphy. Her books include American Religion: A Cultural Perspective
(Prentice-Hall, 1984); New Religions and the Theological Imagination
in America (Indiana University Press, 1989); and The Religious Imagi¬
nation of American Women (Indiana University Press, 1999).

Margaret Bendroth is Executive Director of the American Congre¬

gational Association and director of the Congregational Library in
Boston, Massachusetts. She is the author of several books, including
viii CONTRIBUTORS

Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present (Yale University

Press, 1993) and Growing Up Protestant: Parents, Children, and Main¬
line Churches (Rutgers University Press, 2002). She was co-editor,
with Virginia Brereton, of an award-winning book of essays, Women
and Twentieth-Century Protestantism (University of Illinois Press,
2002).

Oscar Cole-Arnal is Professor Emeritus of the History of Christian¬

ity, Waterloo Lutheran Seminary, Waterloo, Ontario. He has published
five books, including a Canadian liberation theology and Priests in
Working Class Blue (Paulist, 1986), about the French worker-priests,
and over twenty articles, mostly about modern French Catholicism.
Currently he is working on two books, one on Quebec Catholicism
and the working class and the other a theological book with a col¬
league Timothy Hegedus on the politically radical side of the Protes¬
tant doctrine of justification by grace through faith.

Valerie DeMarinis is Professor in Psychology of Religion and Cul¬

tural Psychology and chair of the Department of Religion and the
Social Sciences at Uppsala University in Uppsala, Sweden. She is the
director of the European Union Diploma Program in Psychology of
Religion for the Scandinavian countries. Her current research proj¬
ects include the subject of religiosity and meaning-making as well as
cultural psychology, health, and intervention systems, including an
interdisciplinary project focused on Afro-Brazilian culture, religiosity,
and empowerment in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil.

Eleazar S. Fernandez, a native of the Philippines, is currently Pro¬

fessor of Constructive Theology at United Theological Seminary of
the Twin Cities, Minnesota. Among his major works are Reimagin¬
ing the Human (Chalice, 2004), Realizing the America of Our Hearts,
co-edited with Fumitaka Matsuoka (Chalice, 2003), A Dream Unfin¬
ished, co-edited with Fernando Segovia (Orbis, 2000), and Toward a
Theology of Struggle (Orbis, 1994).

Bruce David Forbes is the Arthur L. Bunch Professor of Religious

Studies at Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa. He is a cofounder
of the Religion and Popular Culture program unit within the Ameri-
 Contributors ix

can Academy of Religion. He is the coeditor of Religion and Popular

Culture in America (University of California Press, 2000, revised 2005)
and Rapture, Revelation, and the End Times: Exploring the Left Behind
Series (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), and he is the author of Christmas:
A Candid History (University of California Press, 2007).

Patrick Henry taught in the religion department at Swarthmore Col¬

lege in Pennsylvania (1967-1984) and was executive director of the
Collegeville Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research in Min¬
nesota (1984-2004). His books include New Directions in New Testa¬
ment Study (Westminster, 1979), The Ironic Christians Companion:
Finding the Marks of Gods Grace in the World (Riverhead, 1999), and,
with Donald Swearer, For the Sake of the World: The Spirit of Buddhist
and Christian Monasticism (Fortress Press, 1989). He is the editor
of Benedicts Dharma: Buddhists Reflect on the Rule of St. Benedict
(Riverhead, 2001).

Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, a native of Cuba, is Professor of Ethics and

Theology at Drew University, New Jersey. Since the 1970s she has
lectured extensively in the USA and abroad and has taught in Cuba,
Philippines, and Korea. Her publications include Hispanic Women:
Prophetic Voice in the Church (University of Scranton Press, 2006), En
la Lucha—A Hispanic Womens Liberation Theology (Fortress Press,
1993), Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the 21st Century (Orbis,
1996), and La Lucha Continues—Mujerista Theology (Orbis, 2004).
She is currently writing a book on justice as a reconciliatory praxis of
care and tenderness.

Paul Mojzes is Professor of Religious Studies at Rosemont College,

Rosemont, Pennsylvania, and is visiting professor of Holocaust and
Genocide Studies at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. A native
of Yugoslavia, Mojzes is the coeditor of the Journal of Ecumenical
Studies and founder and editor of Religion in Eastern Europe. He is
the author of five and the editor of several books and has written
many articles. Among his recent books are Religious Liberty in East¬
ern Europe and the USSR (1992), Yugoslavian Inferno: Ethnoreligious
Warfare in the Balkans (Continuum, 1994), and, as editor or coeditor,
Religion and War in Bosnia (American Academy of Religion, 1998)
CONTRIBUTORS

and Interreligious Dialogue toward Reconciliation in Macedonia and

Bosnia (Journal of Ecumenical Studies, 2002).

Mark A. Noll is Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the

University of Notre Dame. His recent books include Americas God:
From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford University Press,
2002), 7he Civil War as a Theological Crisis (University of North Caro¬
lina, 2006), and Race, Religion, and American Politics from Nat Turner
to George W. Bush: A Short History (2008). He has also written widely
on the history of evangelical Protestantism, including The Scandal of
the Evangelical Mind (Eerdmans, 1994) and The Rise of Evangelicalism:
The Age of Edwards, Whitefield, and the Wesleys (InterVarsity, 2004).

Mercy Amba Oduyoye, a native of Ghana, has been a high school

teacher and a Professor of Religious Studies and served as Deputy
General Secretary of the World Council of Churches in Geneva. She is
the author of numerous articles and a number of books, among them
Daughters of Anowa: African Women and Patriarchy (Orbis, 1995),
Introducing African Womens Theology (Pilgrim, 2001), and Beads and
Strands: Reflections of an African Woman on Christianity in Africa
(Orbis, 2004). Her research interests and publications reflect her con¬
cern for the liberation of African women, and she is presently serving
as the founding director of the Talitha Qumi Centre, an institute of
Women, Religion, and Culture on the campus of Trinity Theological
Seminary, Accra, Ghana.

Ann M. Pederson is Professor of Religion at Augustana College in

Sioux Falls, South Dakota. She is also an adjunct Associate Professor
in the Section of Ethics and Humanities at the Sanford School of Med¬
icine at the University of South Dakota. She has authored three books,
including The Music of Creation (Fortress Press, 2005), which she co¬
authored with Arthur Peacocke. She is also the author of numerous
articles in various journals on topics ranging from feminist thought in
religion and science to Lutheran theology. Her current research inter¬
ests focus on the intersection between theology and medicine.

Luis N. Rivera-Pagan is Emeritus Professor of Ecumenics at Princeton

Theological Seminary. His publications include A Violent Evangelism:
 Contributors xi

The Political and Religious Conquest of the Americas (Westminster

John Knox, 1992), Mito, exilio y demonios: literatura y teologia en
America Latina (1996), Dialogos y polifonias: perspectivas y resehas
(1999), and Essays from the Diaspora (2002). He has edited the official
report of the most recent assembly of the World Council of Churches,
God, in Your Grace . . . (Geneva, 2007). His current area of research
focuses on theology and culture in Latin America.

Rosetta E. Ross teaches religious studies at Spelman College in

Atlanta, Georgia. Her research and writing explore the role of religion
in black womens activism. She is author of Witnessing and Testifying:
Black Women, Religion, and Civil Rights, which examines religion as
a source that helped engender and sustain activities of seven black
women civil rights leaders. Ross and her partner, Ronald S. Bonner,
reside in Atlanta.

Ethan R. Sanders is a postgraduate student on the faculty of history at

the University of Cambridge. While he has a broad interest in global
Christianity during the last two centuries, his main area of study is in
the history of modern Africa. He has written a forthcoming article
on Christianity in Central Africa, and his current project focuses on
the role played by graduates of Universities Mission to Central Africa
schools in the Tanganyika African National Union and the making of
Tanzanian nationalism. He is a member of Selwyn College.

Cristina L. H. Traina is Associate Professor of Religion at Northwest¬

ern University, where she teaches courses in Christian theology and
Christian and comparative ethics. She is the author of Natural Law
and Feminist Ethics: The End of the Anathemas (Georgetown Univer¬
sity Press, 1999) and of a number of articles on the ethics of sexuality
and assisted reproduction, theology and ethics of childhood, and top¬
ics related to trade, immigration, and the environment. She is cur¬
rently writing a book on the ethics of touch in parent-child relations.

Jean-Paul Wiest, founder and former director of the Center for Mis¬
sion Research and Study at Maryknoll, is presently Research Director
of the Beijing Center for Chinese Studies and Distinguished Fellow
of the EDS-Steward Chair at the Ricci Institute of the University of
xii CONTRIBUTORS

San Francisco. His primary field of research is the history of Chris¬

tianity in modern and contemporary China with an emphasis on
Sino-Western cultural and religious interactions. He has published
extensively in French, English, and Chinese. Among other volumes,
he is the author, with Thomas Bamat, of Popular Catholicism in a
World Church: Seven Case Histories in Inculturation (Orbis, 1999).
 ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures
0.1 Head of Christ, Warner Sallman 7
0.2 Jesus Christ and close-up, Kaadaa 8
0.3 Jesus of the People, Janet McKenzie 13
0.4 Head of Christ, Elimo P. Njau 19
0.5 Haitian women and image of Jesus in Port au Prince, Haiti 20
0.6 The Crucifixion, Jim Colclough 26
0.7 World map with Christian populations, 1900 and 2005 32-33
1.1 A Jeepney in the Philippines 38
1.2 The Suffering Christ, San Agustin Church, Manila, Philippines 41
1.3 Religious procession, Samar Island, Philippines 48
1.4 Smokey Mountain 2, Manila, Philippines 56
1.5 Cemetery, Philippines 57
2.1 Victoria Way DeLee 62
2.2 Fannie Lou Hamer, Atlantic City, New Jersey 63
2.3 Ella Baker, Atlantic City, New Jersey 65
2.4 Fannie Lou Hamer, Hattiesburg, Mississippi 68
2.5 Heather Tobis Booth talks with a woman in Mississippi 75
3.1 Logo of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians 85
3.2 Mother and Child, Gerard Sekoto 87
3.3 Musimbi Kanyoro 89
3.4 Annunciation of the Angel to Mary, Lamidi Fakeye 99
3.5 Mercy Amba Oduyoye 106
4.1 Spiritual communion, Spanish Harlem, New York City 108
4.2 Protest outside church, Spanish Harlem, New York City 111
4.3 Statue of Mary, La Dolorosa, Spanish Harlem 119
4.4 Women pray on feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe 120
5.1 St. Sergius, Holy Trinity Monastery, Zagorsk, Russia 142
5.2 Russian Icon of Christ Pantocrator 147
5.3 Eucharist ceremony in Orthodox church 149

xiii
XIV ILLUSTRATIONS

5.4 Blessing of food in Orthodox church 149

5.5 Bringing of yule log into Orthodox church 150
5.6 Folk dancing outside Orthodox church 150
5.7 Church of Saint Sava in Belgrade, Serbia 154
6.1 Young girls receiving Bibles at church 159
6.2 Hudson Taylor 164
6.3 George Mueller 164
6.4 Evangelical revival meeting with D. L. Moody and Ira Sankey 172
6.5 Willow Creek Community Church, South Barrington, Illinois 178
6.6 WWJD? (What Would Jesus Do?) bracelet 182
6.7 Christian-themed clothing 183
6.8 Christian rock concert 184
6.9 Decorative crosses 185
7.1 Healing, Victory Christian Center, Dominican Republic 193
7.2 Small shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe 194
7.3 Honduras Church Leaders Conference and Crusade 196
7.4 Pentecostal ceremony in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (stands) 198
7.5 Pentecostal ceremony in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (center) 198
7.6 Mother Church of the Christian Congregation in Brazil 204
8.1 Left Behind, Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins 213
8.2 John Darby 218
8.3 Western movie Shane 225
9.1 Indoor Catholic service in Shaanxi Province, China 235
9.2 Outdoor Catholic service in Shaanxi Province, China 238
9.3 Catholic woman in Shaanxi Province, China 241
10.1 Twelfth-century church in Gotland, Sweden 249
10.2 Modern building and church in Stockholm, Sweden 251
10.3 Gathering at a Sophia Mass in Sweden 255
10.4 Preparation for Eucharist at a Sophia Mass in Sweden 256
11.1 German Christian movement convention, Berlin, Germany 267
11.2 Ludwig Mueller, Berlin cathedral, Germany 270
11.3 World War II refugees, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, France 275
11.4 Children sheltered at a convent school in Lomna, Poland 276
12.1 Logo of the World Council of Churches 284
12.2 Humor, Holy Conversation, Prayer, Rosanne Keller 299
12.3 Workshop in the Ecumenical Community of Taize in France 302
12.4 Donnellson Presbyterian Church, Donnellson, Iowa 305
12.5 Zion Mennonite Church, Donnellson, Iowa 305
13.1 Lecture on “Caring for your Baby,” Nanking, China 315
13.2 Bishop Barbara Harris, Episcopal Church 318
13.3 Woman evangelist in India 320
13.4 A Promise Keepers meeting 323
 Illustrations xv

14.1 “The Mercy of His Friends” cartoon, Arch Dale 329

14.2 The Winnipeg Strike of 1919, Manitoba, Canada 332
14.3 Jeunesse Ouvriere Catholique group, Canada 342
14.4 Soup kitchen, Montreal, Quebec, Canada 349
15.1 Father George Deshon 354
15.2 British Catholic family 361

15.3 The Art of Natural Family Planning, John F. Kippley and

Sheila K. Kippley 368
15.4 For Better... Forever! A Catholic Guide to Lifelong Marriage,
Gregory K. Popcak 369
16.1 Parents of Karen Ann Quinlan 382
16.2 Premature baby in neonatal intensive care unit 385
16.3 Elderly woman in intensive care unit 398

Color Plates (following page 204)

A Christ in the Manger, Francis Musango
B Peace Be Still, He Qi
C “Mary ... Rabboni”. .. John 20:16, Hanna-Cheriyan Varghese
D Meeting of Liberation Theology delegates, Trindade, Brazil
E Feeding of the 5,000 (1999), Laura James
F Black Madonna II (Classic), Elizabeth Barakah Hodges
G The Rapture, Charles Anderson
H The Creche, Joseph Stella
FOREWORD

T his seven-volume series breaks new ground by looking at

Christianity’s past from the vantage point of a peoples history. It is
church history, yes, but church history with a difference: “church,” we
insist, is not to be understood first and foremost as the hierarchical-
institutional-bureaucratic corporation; rather, above all, it is the laity,
the ordinary faithful, the people. Their religious lives, their pious prac¬
tices, their self-understandings as Christians, and the way all of this
grew and changed over the last two millennia—this is the unexplored
territory in which we are here setting foot.
To be sure, the undertaking known as people’s history, as it is
applied to secular themes, is hardly a new one among academic his¬
torians. Referred to sometimes as history from below, or grassroots
history, or popular history, it was born about a century ago, in con¬
scious opposition to the elitism of conventional (some call it Rankean)
historical investigation, fixated as this was on the “great” deeds of
“great” men, and little else. What had always been left out of the story,
of course, was the vast majority of human beings: almost all women,
obviously, but then too all those who could be counted among the
socially inferior, the economically distressed, the politically marginal¬
ized, the educationally deprived, or the culturally unrefined. Had not
various elites always despised “the people”? Cicero, in first-century
bce Rome, referred to them as “urban filth and dung”; Edmund
Burke, in eighteenth-century London, called them “the swinish mul¬
titude”; and in between, this loathing of “the meaner sort” was almost
xviii FOREWORD

universal among the privileged. When the discipline called “history”

was professionalized in the nineteenth century, traditional gentlemen
historians perpetuated this contempt, if not by outright vilification,
then at least by keeping the masses invisible. Thus when people’s his¬
tory came on the scene, it was not only a means for uncovering an
unknown dimension of the past but also in some sense an instrument
for righting an injustice. Today its cumulative contribution is enor¬
mous, and its home in the academic world is assured.
Only quite recently has the discipline formerly called “church
history” and now more often “the history of Christianity” begun to
open itself up to this approach. Its agenda over the last two centuries
has been dominated by other facets of this religions past, such as
theology, dogma, institutions, and ecclesio-political relations. Each of
these has in fact long since evolved into its own subdiscipline. Thus
the history of theology has concentrated on the self-understandings of
Christian intellectuals. Historians of dogma have examined the way in
which church leaders came to formulate teachings that they then pro¬
nounced normative for all Christians. Experts on institutional history
have researched the formation, growth, and functioning of leadership
offices, bureaucratic structures, official decision-making processes,
and so forth. And specialists in the history of church-state relations
have worked to fathom the complexities of the institution’s interface
with its sociopolitical context, above all by studying leaders on both
sides.
Collectively, these conventional kinds of church history have
yielded enough specialized literature to fill a very large library, and
those who read in this library will readily testify to its amazing trea¬
sures. Erudite as it is, however, the Achilles’ heel of this scholarship,
taken as a whole, is that it has told the history of Christianity as the
story of one small segment of those who have claimed the name
“Christian.” What has been studied almost exclusively until now is the
religion of various elites, whether spiritual elites, or intellectual elites,
or power elites. Without a doubt, mystics and theologians, pastors,
priests, bishops, and popes are worth studying. But at best they alto¬
gether constitute perhaps 5 percent of all Christians over two millen¬
nia. What about the rest? Does not a balanced history of Christianity,
not to mention our sense of historical justice, require that attention be
paid to them?
 Foreword xix

Around the mid-twentieth century, a handful of scholars began,

hesitantly and yet insistently, to press this question on the interna¬
tional guild of church historians. Since that time, the study of the other
95 percent has gained momentum: ever more ambitious research
projects have been launched; innovative scholarly methods have been
developed, critiqued, and refined; and a growing public interest has
greeted the results. Academics and nonacademics alike want to know
about this aspect of Christianity’s past. Who were these people—the
voiceless, the ordinary faithful who wrote no theological treatises,
whose statues adorn no basilicas, who negotiated no concordats,
whose very names themselves are largely lost to historical memory?
What can we know about their religious consciousness, their devo¬
tional practice, their understanding of the faith, their values, beliefs,
feelings, habits, attitudes, and their deepest fears, hopes, loves, hatreds,
and so forth? And what about the troublemakers, the excluded, the
heretics, those defined by conventional history as the losers? Can a
face be put on any of them?
Today, even after half a century of study, answers are still in
short supply. It must be conceded that the field is in its infancy, both
methodologically and in terms of what remains to be investigated.
Very often historians now find themselves no longer interrogating
literary texts but rather artifacts, the remains of material culture,
court records, wills, popular art, graffiti, and so forth. What is already
clear is that many traditional assumptions, timeworn cliches, and
well-loved nuggets of conventional wisdom about Christianity’s past
will have to be abandoned. When the Christian masses are made the
leading protagonists of the story, we begin to glimpse a plot with
dramatically new contours. In fact, a rewriting of this history is now
getting under way, and this may well be the discipline’s larger task for
the twenty-first century.
A People’s History of Christianity is our contribution to this enter¬
prise. In it we gather up the early harvest of this new approach, show¬
case the current state of the discipline, and plot a trajectory into the
future. Essentially what we offer here is a preliminary attempt at a new
and more adequate version of the Christian story—one that features
the people. Is it comprehensive? Impossible. Definitive? Hardly. A
responsible, suggestive, interesting base to build on? We are confident
that it is.
XX FOREWORD

Close to a hundred historians of Christianity have generously

applied their various types of expertise to this project, whether as
advisers or editors or contributors. They have in common no uni¬
versally agreed-on methodology, nor do they even concur on how
precisely to define problematic terms such as “popular religion.” What
they do share is a conviction that rescuing the Christian people from
their historic anonymity is important, that reworking the story’s plot
with lay piety as the central narrative will be a contribution of lasting
value, and that reversing the condescension, not to say contempt, that
all too often has marred elite views of the people is long overdue. If
progress is made on these fronts, we believe, the groundwork for a
new history of Christianity will have been prepared.
In this seventh and final volume of our People’s History, we can
begin to gauge how far Christian believers have come since the earli¬
est “Jesus movements” of first-century Galilee. We would be living in
a dream-world, however, if we thought that here the loose ends would
be neatly tied up in an ultimate denouement, of either triumph or
oblivion. Satisfying as that might be on one level, it would be less than
honest. History is not over, nor is it transparent. The data dealt with
here are ambiguous. Direction is difficult to discern: we are forced
to speak not of one but of multiple trajectories. For help in sorting
through and making sense of twentieth-century Christianity’s various
trends, movements, currents and countercurrents, I cannot think of a
better guide than the editor of this volume, Mary Farrell Bednarowski.
Her intelligence, her careful judgment, her grasp of the big picture,
and her warm humanity have made my work with her a happy learn¬
ing experience at every stage.
As this publication nears completion, I cannot fail to express my
appreciation to the many people at Fortress Press who facilitated the
project at every stage. It was seven years ago in Denver that Editor-in-
Chief Michael West planted the initial idea and asked me to develop
it. Since then he has been a constant source of encouragement, wise
advice, and good humor. I owe him a large debt of gratitude.

Denis R. Janz, General Editor

MULTIPLICITY AND
AMBIGUITY

MARY FARRELL BEDNAROWSKI

INTRODUCTION

CHRISTIAN HISTORY AS STORY

On the eve of el dia de los muertos we are gathered in the crypt of the
parrochia, the parish church, in the center of San Miguel de Allende
in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico. Our guide, Cesar del Rio, points
to the tomb of his uncle who committed suicide when Cesar was three
years old, not long after his uncle had had an encounter with what he
experienced as an evil force or spirit in this same crypt where other
ancestors are buried. Cesar acknowledges both the impossibility that
this event was “real”—he knows a lot about psychology—and his own
inability to disbelieve it completely. He tells us that he is typical of
many Mexican people born in the 1960s: of mestizo (European and
indigenous) heritage; a professional person who holds a law degree;
a teacher of history; Roman Catholic by heritage and, at least in part,
by belief. He is, he tells us, “superstitious.” He participates fully and
proudly in an annual procession that begins its winding way down
from the mountains behind San Miguel at midnight and culminates
in the city at sunrise. He occasionally visits the shrine of Our Lady
of Guadalupe with his mother and other relatives. As he looks at the
shrines much-venerated painting, he is powerfully moved because of
all she means to the people of Mexico and to people of other Latin
American countries, but he asks Our Lady, “Are you real? Do you
really help us?”1

l
2 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

* * *

The island of Gotland lies in the Baltic Sea where it borders Latvia,
Estonia, and Sweden, to which it has belonged since 1645. A short
ferry ride to the north is the island of Faro, site of Ingmar Bergmans
home and film studios. Only fifty kilometers wide (population
approximately 57,600), Gotland is home to more than ninety medi¬
eval churches built between 1100 and 1350. Church-building ceased
in 1350 after Gotland’s fortunes as a major Hanseatic League port
declined. The churches were left “frozen in time” according to a pam¬
phlet, “The Key to the Churches in the Diocese of Visby,” published
for visitors by the Church of Sweden (Lutheran). Although thousands
of stained glass windows, wooden statues, and wall paintings were
destroyed during and after the Reformation, the churches themselves
were not destroyed, most likely because there were not sufficient funds
to demolish and rebuild them, as happened in other parts of Sweden.
The churches may be frozen in time architecturally, but they are all
still in use today, not merely tourist attractions. Congregations are
small, between a hundred and three hundred, and attendance is low
at the every-other-Sunday services, sometimes not more than ten or
twenty. The churches are “in the midst of life” on Gotland, says the
Bishop of Visby, concerned not just with church life but with what
happens in the community: “Spiritual and secular interests are inter¬
linked. The church on Gotland has accepted the challenge of forming
modern church services in medieval church chambers.”2

* * *

Marika Cico (pronounced “tsitso”), a ninety-five-year-old Albanian

Orthodox Christian when writer Jim Forest met her in the early 1990s,
tells the story of the first liturgy celebrated in the town of Korea since
the communist government closed all the churches in 1967. “Finally,”
she said, “the Communist time began to end [in 1990]. We were so
happy, but all the churches were closed. In response to our request,
the government in Korea decided we could have one church back and
that we would be permitted to have the liturgy there. The first service
we prepared for was Theophany on the 6th of January in 1991. We had
been preparing everything, but needed a bell! Then we found the solu-
 Multiplicity and Ambiguity | Bednarowski 3

tion, a large brass mortar used for grinding garlic. It rang perfectly.”
The “time of no churches” was over.3

* * *

“When he was in his mid-teens Sadao Watanabe, a well-known

Japanese print artist, first visited a Christian church, introduced by
a neighbor who was a school teacher. He had lost his father when
he was ten years old, and tended to live a closed and isolated life. He
described his first impression of Christianity as follows:
“‘In the beginning I had a negative reaction to Christianity. The
atmosphere was full of ‘the smell of butter,’ so foreign to the ordinary
Japanese’
“Now in his print work he joyfully depicts the celebration of the
holy communion with sushi, pickled fish and rice, a typical Japanese
dish, served on traditional folk art plates. For him rice is a more natural
and a more fitting symbol of daily food than bread which is foreign.”4

A A A

According to longtime Maryknoll missionaries Joseph Healey and

Donald Sybert, there are many concrete African metaphors for the
church as “the people of God.” One is the fireplace or the hearth:

In Kenya, the Kikuyu word for “fire” is “mwaki.” Traditionally, a

small group or community gathered around the fire, fireplace, or
hearth. A neighborhood community was called “mwaki” from the
way that people made a fire and shared that fire. When the fire
had been lit in one home, all the other homes in the neighborhood
took their fire from that one place. This sharing of fire helped
them to identify themselves as one community. “Mwaki” or “fire”
was symbolic of other types of sharing and forms of communion,
such as celebrations, performing local ceremonies, and discussing
and approving important community issues. The fireplace with a
cooking pot is a symbol in Africa for God blessing the people.5

A A A

An eighty-year-old Christian man stands guard at his wife’s hospital

bed in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She has been on life support for several
4 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

months and is unresponsive. Her doctors are concerned that her body
is beginning to deteriorate. Her husband is convinced that he has the
moral obligation to keep her alive “until God takes her.” Their adult
children are divided on how to proceed.
In the neonatal intensive care unit of the same hospital, young
parents, members of a social justice-oriented Roman Catholic parish,
watch their twin daughters from behind a wall of glass. Born fourteen
weeks premature, they are attached to numerous tubes and tiny enough
to fit in their fathers hand. There is no certainty about what lies ahead
for them, physically or mentally. At the very least there will be many sur¬
geries and months in the hospital. The parents have always said to each
other that they would never choose—for themselves—to hold on to life
at all costs. But what are the most loving, the most Christian decisions
to make for their daughters? And what will help them decide? Medical
advice? The counsel of clergy? The wisdom of their own hearts?

* * *

The New Saint Joseph People’s Prayer Book, published by the Catholic
Book Publishing Company in 1980 and 1993, is available at any ordi¬
nary Roman Catholic religious goods store. Along with “traditional
and contemporary prayers for every need and occasion,” there is a sec¬
tion of more than eighty pages called “Prayers from Other Religions”:
Protestant and Orthodox Christians; Jewish religion; religions of the
East; and religions of the Americas (Native American prayers). One of
the most intriguing prayers, given the history of Christianity’s innu¬
merable and often violent disputes over matters of doctrine and ritual,
is a “Prayer of Thanksgiving for the Gifts of the Various Christian
Churches,” with invocations such as the following: “For the Eastern
Orthodox Church: its secret treasure of mystic experience; its marvel¬
ous liturgy; its regard for the collective life and its common will as a
source of authority,” and “For the power of the Methodists to awaken
the conscience of Christians to our social evils; and for their emphasis
upon the witness of personal experience, and upon the power of the
disciplined life.”6 Who would have dreamed in the years before the
Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) that such a prayer book, meant
for ordinary Catholics, would exist before the end of the twentieth
century, if ever?
 Multiplicity and Ambiguity Bednarowski 5

* * *

So many stories! And such various stories. Religion is story before it

is anything else, and it is story after it is everything else. This is the
intriguing claim of sociologist, novelist, and Roman Catholic priest
Andrew Greeley, one that he has made many times in both schol¬
arly and popular arenas. A peoples history of Christianity is, finally,
story-history—not analyses of theological abstractions or institutional
development and disputes. These are stories about daily life, about
emotions and struggles, about transformations and tragedies, about
the devotional piety and convictions and doubts, the creation and
disruption and re-creation of families, communities, and worldviews.
They are not isolated stories, because stories without context and
interpretation are merely anecdotes—interesting, often touching or
instructive, but not necessarily illuminating about broader issues and
patterns. Thus for each of the stories above and for those that will fol¬
low in the chapters of this volume, there are back stories, distinctive
histories of religious and cultural circumstances.
We find in these twentieth-century stories multiple plotlines
that take on powerful significance when we look at them in terms of
peoples history:

• encounters between intense religious devotion and modern

and postmodern consciousness;
• the waning of church membership and attendance and
the decline of this institutions cultural relevance—or so it
appears at the moment—in many developed countries of
the West;
• the repression and then the reemergence of Christianity in
the aftermath of totalitarian regimes;
• the several-centuries-long unfolding of religious dynamics
related to colonialism, inculturation, and postcolonialism in
Africa, Asia, and Latin America;
• the realization that women, while very much present in
the church, have been for the most part absent from written
history;
• the bewilderment not just of ordinary people but of experts,
6 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

both religious and medical, over issues related to the

beginning and the end of life;
• the realities associated with increasing religious pluralism
and the discovery that “the other,” whether Christian or
non-Christian, now lives not on another continent or in
the neighboring town but next door;
• the discoveries of dimensions of power and wisdom,
courage and creativity that figure prominently in the
peoples stories and that bring new depth to the study of
Christianity.

The people’s histories of Christianity in the twentieth century differ

from continent to continent, country to country, tradition to tradi¬
tion, and even neighborhood to neighborhood. For that reason the
stories and the themes in this last volume of A Peoples History of
Christianity are geographically and culturally, chronologically and
methodologically, literally and figuratively all over the map. The
chapters cannot attempt to cover global Christianity, from the begin¬
ning of the twentieth century to its end. There are other volumes
available that take this chronological approach.7 Instead, this book
offers a range of angles on some of the crises, the opportunities, the
challenges, the disillusionments, and the hopeful surprises that Chris¬
tianity has encountered in the twentieth century: global, regional,
communal, and individual. A more modest title for this volume might
well be Some Selected Elements of a Peoples History of Twentieth-
Century Global Christianity.

CHRISTIANITY ON EVERY CONTINENT

By the end of the twentieth century Christianity had taken root and
shape all over the world and in the consciousness of Christians as a
global religion. One of the major themes of this volume is the extent to
which Christianity has demonstrated its capacity to assume multiple
forms and still be recognizable as the religion of Jesus. If the history
of the peoples Christianity in the twentieth century tells us anything,
it lets us know that whatever else it may be—and this it has in com-
 Multiplicity and Ambiguity | Bednarowski 7

mon with other world religions—it is a vast arena of human creativity

whose symbols, rituals, scriptures, and stories are translatable across
multiple cultural and historical boundaries.
The face of Jesus is familiar when it appears in the art of many
cultures, no matter how different he looks from the famous and
ubiquitous Head of Christ by Warner Sallman.8 The
elements of communion are recognizable within the
forms of dried fish and rice and in the basic foods of
other parts of the world. What is essential, the histo¬
ries of the people tell us, is the gathering for a meal f a -f

taken together. The stories of the Bible are translatable,

capable of speaking movingly to experiences that cross
many kinds of boundaries, although this kind of trans¬
lating is not merely a process of substituting the words
of one language for the words of another. Translation
is interpretation is transformation, and the Bible in the
“non-biblical world,” as Hong Kong scholar Kwok Pui-
lan tells us, is not the same “book” that it is in the West.9
To claim these things is by no means to make the case
that the history of the peoples Christianity in the twentieth century Fig. O.t. Head of Christ
by Warner Sallman (1892—
is a history of triumphalism, one of Christianity’s traditional tempta¬ 1968). © 1941 Warner Press,
tions to excess. It is to say that all these things speak of the peoples Inc., Anderson, Ind. Used by
permission.
history of Christianity as the history of the peoples creativity: taking
the “stuff” of Christianity—its scriptures, symbols, rituals, and moral
codes—and making it their own in various parts of the world.

CHRISTENDOM OR CHRISTIANITIES
As many sources tell us, Christianity at the end of the twentieth century
remained the largest of the worlds religions, although not by as large a
percentage of the worlds population as was the case in 1900.10 Much
of the news about Christianity at the end of the twentieth century
focused on the extent to which its population centers had moved to the
southern hemisphere. Predictions abound about what this means. Will
the shift southward bring with it very different forms of Christianity,
the likes of which we have not seen before? Or, as some suggest, will
 8 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

it be mostly a premodern Christianity, a supernaturalist Christianity,

very familiar to anthropologists and historians of religions?
If the number of Christians is increasing in the southern hemi¬
sphere, what is happening in the north? What does the history of
Christianity in the West tell us? Is Christianity in the northern hemi¬
sphere losing its vitality, its cultural relevance? Is it collapsing into
secular culture, becoming so “worldly” that soon its distinctive char¬
acteristics will no longer be discernible? Or is it changing its forms in
ways that are only barely evident at present, moving away from reli¬
ance on church bureaucracies and beginning to revitalize the churches
with new forms of community? Some huge urban Roman Catholic
parishes in the United States are dividing into “house churches” and
at the same time retaining their connection to “the mother church,”
and popular and scholarly religious journals
and books in North America and Great Brit¬
ain are full of articles about “the emerging
church,” devoted to suggestions about what
the church needs to look like and be like in a
pluralist, postmodern world.
The nearly two-millennia-long history of
Christianity makes it unlikely that any one
form of Christianity will prevail in either
hemisphere. More and more, historians are
discovering that Christianity has been diverse
from its very beginnings, much more diverse,
as it turns out, than we have imagined. The
earlier volumes in this series focus as much
on diversity as this one does, in fact, and it
seems wise to take a clue from sociologists of
religion like Rodney Stark and William Sims
Bainbridge, who make the case in The Future
of Religion that in any religious economy, as
they call it, there are always three processes
going on at the same time: secularization;
Fig. 0.2. Jesus Christ and innovation, or the creation of new forms of religion; and revival,
close-up by Kaadaa. Photo
© Kaadaa/Stock Illustration
which they interpret to mean “restoring vigorous unworldliness to
Source/Getty Images. Used a conventional faith. 11 However true that may be in some contexts,
by permission.
I would argue in addition that at the end of the twentieth century
 Multiplicity and Ambiguity Bednarowski 9

“revival” often meant restoring a worldly holiness to conventional faith,

bringing it down to earth. Stark and Bainbridge’s insight nonetheless
helps to make sense of why no one trajectory is adequate to interpret
what is going on in the religious history of ordinary people, particu¬
larly if we think about global Christianity as the economy with which
we are concerned, not just one continent or region. The stories in the
chapters of this volume will help make clear not only the extent to
which secularization, innovation, and revival are intertwined with
each other all over the world but the multiple ways that Christians in
different parts of the world are in touch with each other.
Present-day mission history is, in fact, instructive about these
realities. Missionaries at mid-century and even more recently have
been maligned for bringing colonialism, imperialism, an egregious
sense of cultural and religious superiority, and so many kinds of
exploitation to Asia, Africa, and Latin America that they undermined
any of the goods of education and medical services they brought as
well. By the end of the twentieth century, missionaries were coming
to be seen as experts about the dynamics of cross-cultural exchange,
stressing especially the fact that “it was the missionaries who were
converted” to new cultures and new ways of being Christian and that
mission work is an experience in reciprocity, not of merely “bring¬
ing to.” Speaking in particular to the widespread assumption that
“Christian Britain has died,” Kenneth R. Ross, general secretary of
the Church of Scotland’s Board of World Mission, speaks of “God’s
spiral of renewal” and wonders whether the “new Christendom” of
the southern hemisphere, once the mission territory of the Church of
Scotland, may become the vehicle for its own spiritual renewal.12 It
may well be that the people’s history of twentieth-century Christian¬
ity has been teaching us to speak not of “Christendom” and where its
center has been or will be found at a given moment in history, but of
“Christianities,” whose overlapping circles will have different kinds of
centers visible to each other across the globe.

NEW QUESTIONS
Looking for and learning to tell the people’s histories requires a
kind of metanoia on the part of historians, a turning around, an
10 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

academic conversion experience. We know that church historians

are only recently finding their way to the realities and the signifi¬
cance of peoples history, because that history, however interesting
to anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and social historians,
has not appeared to reveal where the real action was taking place in
the church. The peoples ordinary lives, we assumed, were focused on
matters not weighty enough to survive the filtering process of histories
concerned with philosophical or theological claims that in an earlier
time—not so long ago!—were assumed to embody the truest, high¬
est aspects of the church irrespective of historical or cultural context.
This is a bit of a caricature, of course, but even though each of us has
our own individual histories, it has taken us a long time as scholars
to discover the obvious: the historical and religious significance of the
daily life that surrounds us in particular places, lo cotidiano, as Ada
Maria Isasi-Diaz calls it.
In a book that has become very popular among North American
Protestants and Catholics, Memories of God: Theological Reflections
on a Life,13 Roberta Bondi expressed the astonishment she felt upon
discovering at an ecumenical consultation that the particularities of
her own life story not only could be shared but took on theological
and historical significance when placed in the context of the broader
community. They were not merely personal or cloyingly trivial in the
greater scheme of things. In the stories of those broader “gathered”
communities, the peoples history takes on new life and gives new life
in return. In her study of religious congregations in the United States,
Pillars of Faith: American Congregations and Their Partners, religious
sociologist Nancy Ammerman points to a gap in the study of religion:
“People studying religion either wrote about the great theological and
cultural trends of the day or asked individuals what they believed.”14
Peoples history helps to fill that gap.
Writing history in new ways requires asking new questions and
demands new geometric configurations. It is not enough to invert
the traditional triangle of hierarchy on top and the faithful on the
bottom and declare, “Now we will write about ‘the people.”’ Peoples
history is about new kinds of relationships and finding new ways to
assess the value of the peoples history for understanding the nature
of the church. We have only recently learned to ask questions like the
 Multiplicity and Ambiguity | Bednarowski 11

following: Whose voices have we simply never heard in histories of

Christianity? What stories do we need to unearth about the church
and about Christianity that will reveal to us why there are so few
names of women in standard religious histories when women have
outnumbered men in church membership for centuries? How much
of the history of Christianity have we missed by failing to take note of
the experiences of half of all Christians and to record them? Mission
historian Dana Robert makes a powerful case that world Christianity
is a womens movement and that its contours and its details have been
subsumed within larger narratives about global history. Robert asks
what the study of Christianity would be like if womens stories were
put in the center of research with an emphasis on the complex and
diverse reasons that motivate women to convert to Christianity.15
There is no end to the questions. What realities in the lives of
ordinary people in Latin America have moved so many to embrace
Pentecostalism? What symbols and rituals will people in the countries
of northern Europe draw from as they encounter the need for spiritual
depth while the influence of state churches appears to be waning? By
what strategies do ordinary people keep Christianity alive at times and
in places where displaying any attachment to Christian practice, even
giving your child a “Christian” name, is to court censure, unemploy¬
ment, imprisonment, and even death? What is it about Christianity
and its stories, scriptures, and rituals that have spoken to the lives of
growing numbers of people in Africa and Asia, far from the Christian
heartlands of the West? To what extent and in what ways is the church
involved when the people say “Enough!” about economic injustices
and exploitation?

COMMONALITIES, DISTINCTIONS, PERSPECTIVES

Volume 7 has in common with the other volumes in the series the
challenge of exploring how the history of Christianity and Christians
changes its contours when we emphasize the peoples history rather
than the institution’s history. Like the others, this volume takes for
granted that no single definition of “the people” is adequate for the
stories that follow, particularly not those traditional polarities by
12 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

which we have tried to decide who is ordinary and who is not and in
spite of the fact that there is some truth in all of them: laity rather than
clergy; more likely to be female than male; uneducated rather than
educated; poor rather than affluent; nonprofessional rather than pro¬
fessional (meaning those who have devoted their lives to the church);
and, more recently, southern rather than northern. These either-or
configurations mask the complexities of interaction that make up the
lives of Christians. There are just too many kinds of cross-pollination
among categories for this on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand typol¬
ogy to work.
A major purpose of the whole series is to open up multiple mean¬
ings of “peoples history,” even some that appear contradictory. Are
there circumstances in which theologians or priests, bishops or nuns
might be considered “people” too? Priests and nuns in many parts of
the world live the life of the people they serve, suffering with them the
deprivations of poverty and the lack of even modest political power.
Theologians, some of them famous, undergo crises of faith that are
not resolved by knowledge of sophisticated theological formulations,
and their existential angst cannot be separated from that of any other
Christian. One can turn that question around the other way, too, of
course, and ask whether there aren’t contexts in which “the people”
become the experts, for example, the Latina women about whom
Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz writes—they put together rituals based on their
knowledge of traditional Roman Catholic devotions and the experi¬
ences of their own lives. The task is not to find the single best defini¬
tion but to demonstrate what a lively, fruitful, and provocative concept
“ordinary people’s history” can be—to say nothing of subversive. We
are, really, just getting started.
“Ordinary,” we discover, is itself a relative term that varies not only
from culture to culture but even from body to body. In many cultures,
as will become clear in the chapters to follow, most Christians are
always hungry. It is a basic reality of their daily lives. Some very astute
observations about what it means to live an “ordinary” life are emerg¬
ing from the writings of people with physical disabilities who speak in
terms of learning how to live their “difficult but ordinary” lives.16
There are also issues particular to this volume. Volume 7 focuses
on a one-hundred-year period of time rather than on a discernible
 Multiplicity and Ambiguity Bednarowski 13

era in church history like the Reformation.

In his History of Christianity in the United
States and Canada, Mark Noll reminds us,
“It is a sloppy intellectual habit to think
that the dynamics of lived human experi¬
ence can be neatly packaged into discrete
decades. 7 No doubt this is even more
true of the arbitrary demarcation of one
hundred years. It is striking and very much
a part of the peoples history that the twen¬
tieth century has seen so much scientific,
medical, and technological progress and so
little movement in the realm of “human”
progress. The century started with the
Second Boer War (1899-1902), and World
War I—the Great War, the “war to end all
wars”—was only the beginning rather than
the end of the century’s endless warfare.
Further, there are no obvious demarcations
of the kind that neatly delineate eras of
intellectual history. Many of the chapters in
this volume demonstrate that the premod¬
ern, the modern, and the postmodern do
not constitute eras that follow one another but rather are entangled Fig. 0.3. Jesus of the People by
with each other right to the end of the century in any given culture or Janet McKenzie, who comments
about her painting: "Jesus stand?
congregation or even individual life. Cesar del Rios autobiographical holding his robes, one hand near
account at the beginning makes this point. his heart, and looks at us—and
to us. He is flanked by three
The most obvious challenge of this volume is to select compelling, symbols. The yin-yang symbol
represents perfect harmony, the
representative, evocative, and multifaceted examples of the peoples
halo conveys Jesus' holiness,
histories from endless possibilities. As religious studies scholar David and the feather symbolizes
transcendent knowledge. The
Chidester has said of his own global history of Christianity,18 read¬ feather also refers to the Native
ers will find their own favorite omissions—an exercise, it is hoped, American and the Great Spirit.
The feminine aspect is served by
that will be stimulating rather than frustrating. In contrast with most the fact that although Jesus was
earlier eras of Christian history, the twentieth century offers too many designed as a man with a mas¬
culine presence, the model was
sources from which to choose, rather than hardly any. a woman. The essence of the
There is the additional matter of perspective: not only the cer¬ work is simply that Jesus is all
of us."© 1999 Janet McKenzie,
tainty that we are often “blinded to the recent past,” to use Catholic www.janetmckenzie.com.
14 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

writer Hilaire Belloc’s (1870-1953) phrase, but the fact that many of
the authors of these chapters have lived or are presently living the
histories about which they write. This is true of their subjects as well.
This dual reality does not render historians incapable of writing good
history. If there is anything we have learned in these last generations
of history writing and have come to confess with at least qualified
enthusiasm rather than ruefulness, it is this: that there is no such thing
as objective history, that is, history that does not include the biases
personal, religious, academic, economic, gender, racial, psychological,
political—of the authors. But the question arises then: Who should
write the people’s history? Insofar as possible, the authors of these
chapters let the people tell their own stories. They work to let the
people about whom they write speak through them rather than speak¬
ing for them. In Learning about Theology from the Third World, evan¬
gelical scholar William A. Dyrness reminds his readers, in implicit
sympathy with Andrew Greeley, that we have moved away from
nineteenth-century understandings of history as a transcript of things
as they actually were: “History is rather a people telling their story.”
It makes a difference, Dyrness says, that Latin American history has
been told up to now by people who held power over the region. “What
if this same history,” he asks, “is told by the people who have suf¬
fered under the hardships?”19 Dyrness’s question applies to multiple
contexts in global Christianity. People’s history lets the people speak.
Because we are closer to the sources of people’s history in the twen¬
tieth century than are historians concerned with previous centuries,
there is a great deal in the chapters of this volume not just about what
people have done but about what they have had to say.
Then there is the matter of tone: how to tell the people’s history
without romanticizing it or being condescending toward it or being
fearful of its influence. No family of the Christian tradition seems to
be without some acknowledgement that the people, “the faithful,” have
a significant role to play, one that is more than just obedient support
for the leadership. Examples include the Roman Catholic concept of
the sensus fidelium, the belief that the people of God, empowered by
the Holy Spirit, share among themselves a wisdom about what is true,
right, and good; the Reformation passion for the priesthood of all
 Multiplicity and Ambiguity I Bednarowski 15

believers; in Russian Orthodoxy the 'gathered” (sobranie or sobor),

without whose consent doctrine cannot be affirmed. Both leaders and
laity often assume implicitly that the faithfuls role should be more
passive than active in terms of contributing to the “deposit of faith,”
however much contemporary historians and theologians see this con¬
cept as connoting a living rather than a static entity. The people can
make the leaders, even in very low-church traditions, very nervous,
and many institutional safeguards ensure against giving too much
credence to the sensus fidelium, especially if it feels to church leaders
more like mere popular opinion. The doctrine of the primacy of indi¬
vidual conscience in Roman Catholicism teaches that when members
of the church feel deeply that the church is wrong, they have a moral
obligation to act or refuse to act in accord with their own consciences.
The assumption is nonetheless that the individual’s conscience has
been formed by the tradition to begin with.
Taking very seriously the practices and beliefs, various forms
of resistance and persistence, faithfulness and rebellion of ordinary
Christians calls into question—and this is the purpose of the entire
series—what we have long assumed to be the proper subject matters
of church history or, as we have called it more recently, Christian his¬
tory: theology, church as institution, clergy and hierarchy, doctrinal
disputes. None of these elements is missing from a peoples history,
but they assume the background rather than the foreground of the
chapters in this volume.
We witness in the telling of these stories a transvaluation of values:
that is, they turn upside down and all around the aspects of Christi¬
anity that historians have considered important enough to record.
When Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz writes about Latina women in Spanish
Harlem telling Roman Catholic bishops in a dispute over the closing
of a parish church, “We are the church, the people of God,” we rec¬
ognize that they are drawing from the deepest wells of the Catholic
tradition as well as from the changes brought about in Catholicism by
the Second Vatican Council.20 They are also calling on the authority
of their life experiences and, ironically, in some cases, the church’s
own rhetoric of egalitarianism. Eleazar Fernandez, who grew up in
the Philippines, says of the piety of Filipino taxi drivers, farmers, and
16 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

fisherfolk that “humility or knowing how to bow down to the religious

intuitions of those who are not bred by the academy may be an expres¬
sion of wisdom.” When statistics show that self-identified Roman
Catholics practice birth control and seek abortions about as often as
others in the population in spite of official church prohibitions against
both, we become aware that there is a serious disjuncture between
church teaching and the practices of those who nonetheless consider
themselves faithful. When we learn that babushkas (grandmothers)
were major contributors to the survival of Orthodox Christianity in
Eastern Europe during the communist era, we get a powerful sense
that “hierarchy,” even in an intensely hierarchical part of the Chris¬
tian tradition, must take its place as part of the church, not all of the
church, not even the “top” of the church—that the ostensibly power¬
less in both church and society have their own kind of power. One of
the major purposes of a people’s history of Christianity is to stir things
up rather than to settle them down.
Finally, a peoples history of Christianity in the twentieth century
published only a few years after its ending has one foot in the future.
This is particularly true of subjects like biomedical ethics or specula¬
tions about the future of Western European Christianity in relation
to increasing numbers of Christians in the southern hemisphere. Is it
the task of the historian, generally the purveyor of the past, to resist
the temptation to predict, however cautiously, what recent history
suggests for the future of Christianity in many different forms and all
over the world? Or is this an obligation that the historian is expected
to fulfill?

WE CAN'T STEP INTO THE SAME RIVER TWICE

In terms of major cultural themes in the people’s history of Christian¬
ity in the twentieth century, there doesn’t seem to be much new under
the sun. At many levels it is a history of the repetition of disillusion-
ments: endless warfare; the relentlessness of global poverty and the
disparity between rich and poor; the rapidity with which Christians
turn on one another in various parts of the world; the failures of the
churches to protect the innocents of the world—their own and those
 Multiplicity and Ambiguity | Bednarowski 17

of “others”; the terrifying extent to which Christianity and its leaders

could be co-opted by totalitarian governments in places like Nazi Ger¬
many, the countries of the former USSR, various African one-party
systems, and China (the government-approved part of the Catholic
Church), as well as, many would say, by the conservative wing of the
Republican Party in the United States.
But those are not the only stories. There were also manifestations
of hope and courage, just as there have been in previous eras: the Bar¬
men Declaration of 1934 written by German theologians to resist the
Nazis use of Christian beliefs to further their cause; the many, many
“righteous Gentiles” who are memorialized at the Yad Veshem Holo¬
caust memorial in Israel for helping to save Jews from the Holocaust;
the churches’ roles in the civil rights movement in the United States
and in the end of apartheid in South Africa; the womens movement as
a catalyst for recognizing both the immense contributions of women
to Christianity and the extent of women’s exclusion from centers of
power and from historical accounts; the ongoing work of church social
agencies in response to multiple natural and human-made disasters;
the emergence of liberation theologies related to gender, race, class,
and sexual orientation; the beginnings of Christian response to eco¬
logical degradation.
Besides the stories of disillusionment, hope, and courage, the
history of Christianity in the twentieth century is full of the unex¬
pected. There have been surprising events that are still unfolding,
like the Second Vatican Council and the astonishing fact that a huge
part of the Christian tradition (Roman Catholics constitute half the
Christians in the world) can undergo a cataclysmic change that no
one anticipated. There is the ecumenical movement that at the end of
the twentieth century some experts considered to be moribund, but
its ongoing influence appears to be moving Christianity into a post-
denominational world. There is the transformed nature of mission
work and the Christianizing of sub-Saharan Africa. Historians would
have been likely to predict none of this at the beginning of the twenti¬
eth century. Many consider the World Missionary Conference in Edin¬
burgh in 1910 the start of the ecumenical movement, for example, but
no African delegates were present because of the assumption that the
most important mission fields lay in Asia. We might even count as a
18 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

surprise the fact that the secularization thesis—at its most fundamental
the assumption that religion would eventually disappear because it was
no longer needed by a thoroughly enlightened humanity—has been
disproved at this most basic level of interpretation and has evolved in
more sophisticated forms.21 While there are always secularizing pro¬
cesses at work, as Stark and Bainbridge and many others have pointed
out, Christianity as an arena of human creativity is no more likely to
disappear than art or politics or economics.
From the vantage point of people’s history, we return to the
“human-ness” of Christianity as a major and paradoxical discovery
of religious and church historians during the twentieth century. At
one level and in the parlance of theology, this refers to its fallibility, its
sinfulness, its brokenness. But at another level we have come to under¬
stand the churches’ human-ness as a mark of its creativity. What Chris¬
tians once assumed (and, of course, many still do) was “God-given”
in a very direct way—scriptures, doctrines, rituals and the “rightness”
of traditionally prescribed rites—we have come to see through the
people’s history as the fruits of the Christian imagination, that is, the
capacity of ordinary Christians to question and to respond in new ways
when they are confronted by experiences that do not find resolution in
already-existing structures or assumptions about “the way things are
and should be” in either church or society.
We now have overwhelming evidence that the Christian church
in all its varieties, and however it ultimately participates in the
transcendent, is a human institution for good and for ill. Although
this seems to be a discovery of the obvious, it has nonetheless been
a long time in coming. For some it has been a frightening thing to
admit. But in some interesting ways, focusing on the people’s his¬
tory has had the effect of freeing church historians from the need
to defend the church. Not to put too fine a point on the matter, the
church is a mixed bag. In every era, its history calls for both rejoicing
and repenting. The complexities of the people’s history can make it
difficult even to discern virtues from vices: persistence from submis¬
sion or apathetic endurance; conservatism from rigidity: innovation
from loss-of-moorings. We don’t know which are which until we
hear the stories, know the context, and discover who is making the
assessment.
 Multiplicity and Ambiguity Bednarowski 19

TELLING THE STORIES

However much the stories in the chapters that follow are all over the
map, they have in common an emphasis on the voices, the agency, the
emotions, and the daily dilemmas and joys of ordinary Christian peo¬
ple. There are, on the other hand, major contrasts in culture and con¬
text and in how under drastically differing circumstances, Christians
interact with culture and negotiate its enticements and its injustices.
The authors of these chapters pay careful attention to the creativity of
response that twentieth-century Christians in different parts of the
world brought to their circumstances, whether it be a creativity related
to survival or protest, acculturation or resistance to culture, or recog¬
nition of new realities in science, medicine, and technology.
Precisely because one volume cannot begin to take into account
more than a fraction of what the term
“global Christianity” suggests that it
should, many of the chapters do double
and triple duty. The chapters by Rosetta
Ross and Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz inform
us about two specific communities of
women in the United States, but they
give us intimations as well about the
dynamics and historical consequences
of “diaspora” from Africa and Latin
America. A little reading between the
lines of Mercy Amba Oduyoyes his¬
tory of the Circle of Concerned African
Women Theologians reveals a history
of the trajectory of colonialism, mis¬
sion history, and the postcolonial efforts
of Africans to construct an authentic
African Christianity—something new
that also recognizes the needs of women
and their contributions to this enterprise. Eleazar Fernandez’s chapter Fig. 0.4. Head of Christ,
Elimo P. Njau (Tanzania).
on Filipino popular Christianity is not at first glance about ecology,
Courtesy National Archives
but in his focus on people who depend on the land and the ocean for (Contemporary African Art
Select List collection, #146).
their living, there are lessons about natural resources and sustainable
20 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

living. There is no one

chapter about emotion in
this volume, but emotions
are very much at the fore¬
front of a people’s history
of Christianity, and not just
traditional religious emo¬
tions (praise, joy, repen¬
tance, and so forth). Taken
together, these chapters
offer an immense com¬
pendium of feelings: resis¬
tance, persistence, anger,
Fig, 0.5. With an image of sorrow, defiance, pride, disgust, ruefulness, celebration, delight, fear,
Jesus watching over them,
skepticism. The emotional history of twentieth-century Christianity is
street vendors carry goods
at a bus station in Port au also all over the map.
Prince, Haiti, during the
1990s. Photo © Richard
The four chapters of part 1, the Authority of New Voices, opens up
Bickel/Corbis. the lives of those whose presence has been mostly absent from the his¬
tory of Christianity, at least until very recently. Or, to put that a little
differently, the authority of their voices and their experiences has been
absent. When they have appeared at all, it is generally because others
are telling their stories and interpreting the significance of those sto¬
ries. In the chapters that follow, we gain knowledge of how the history
of Christianity expands and takes on new dimensions when historians
and theologians ask people, “What do you know about Christianity
that comes out of the realities of your own lives?” and “How have you
been moved to take action in light of the convictions that have become
clear to you?”
In his portrayal of Filipino people’s religiosity, Eleazar Fernan¬
dez writes about the eclectic piety, the daily lives, and the economic
struggles of ordinary Filipinos. Unlike the rest of Asia, the Philippines
is 85 percent Catholic, and issues of colonization continue to abound
on its many islands. Filipino piety crosses institutional boundaries
between Catholicism, Protestantism, and practices from folk and
nature religion. Fernandez describes popular Christianity as a “cre¬
ative interweaving of worldviews” that also derives wisdom from liv¬
ing close to nature. He draws on the folk wisdom of the people to be
 Multiplicity and Ambiguity | Bednarowski 21

found in popular sayings and argues that “popular spirituality calls for
a spiritual practice that is not isolated in certain places and moments
considered spiritual.” He interprets the role of major aspects of the
Christian tradition—Jesus, Eucharist, devotion to the saints—in the
popular piety of Filipinos with critical empathy. Fernandez’s willing¬
ness to learn from this piety, not just to teach official Christianity in
the same old ways as a corrective to it, offers evidence of the reciprocal
energies that theologians and historians are experiencing from a focus
on the peoples Christianity.
Rosetta Ross’s chapter on rural, evangelical black women in the
mid-twentieth-century South describes the details of daily life for
women who were poor sharecroppers denigrated for reasons of race.
Some of these women, like Victoria Way DeLee (b. 1925) and Fannie
Lou Townsend Hamer (1917-1977), found in evangelical Christian¬
ity the courage and the community support to take on exploitative
agricultural labor practices, white supremacy, and the violence of the
civil rights era. Ross analyzes how both black and white rural Bible
belt evangelical Christianity shaped the upbringing and identities of
DeLee and Hamer positively and negatively and contributed power¬
fully to their success. Both women became famous for their civil rights
work, particularly Hamer, but in a poignant concluding statement,
Ross tells us, “Neither DeLee nor Hamer ever fully escaped poverty”
or completely realized “the benefits of their activism.”
Mercy Amba Oduyoye incorporates references to a history of
colonialism and Western Christianity in a chapter that recounts the
history of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians, of
which she is the primary founder. She offers the opportunity to lis¬
ten to voices heretofore unheard in public, those of African women.
Her story combines elements of theology, strategy, cultural analysis,
and deep practicality in the construction of a women’s institute that
will bring together and serve women, men, and the church all over
Africa. The numerous “communities of accountability” that the Circle
claims—churches, seminaries, academic women, church workers,
women who cannot read, women and men with AIDS—give us a good
idea of the complexities of Christian life in Africa today. The goals
of the Circle range from the traditionally academic (Oduyoye and
many other members of the Circle have been theologically educated
22 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

in the West) to the meeting of the most basic needs of Africans. For
Oduyoye, the Circle’s work also requires the constructing of an Afri¬
can theology that is new: two-winged (that is, both female and male)
and dependent upon neither the static worldview of traditional Afri¬
can religion nor the traditional forms of Western Christianity.
Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz writes about Latinas in Spanish Harlem,
women who are the heart of their parish church and who embody
the life of its community. They are very much aware of themselves
as church, in opposition to the dictates and the indifference of the
clergy and the hierarchy. They convene retreats and conduct services
and exhibit their own ritual expertise, educated and empowered by
the liturgies they have attended all their lives. They are theologically
reflective, deeply convinced that they are indeed the people of God,
and unafraid to confront bishops. They have strong opinions about
God, about relationships, and about the way the universe operates.
A large percentage (now more than one-third) of Catholics in the
U.S.A. are Hispanic, and Hispanic women and their form of Christi¬
anity are bound to have an increasing influence in the years to come.
The chapters in part 2, Traditions and Transformations, focus on
some of the variety of contexts all over the globe that not only foster
change but compel it in response to political and economic reali¬
ties and calamities, as well as issues of cultural influence. In keeping
with an emphasis on people’s history, these chapters play up not just
broad trends but the daily realities of ordinary Christians from very
different parts of the Christian tradition. Each essay emphasizes the
dynamic relationship—sometimes stimulating, sometimes frustrating
or distorting or dangerous—between Christianity and the distinctive
cultures in which it dwells.
In “Orthodoxy under Communism,” Paul Mojzes turns us in
the direction of a very different kind of Christian people’s experi¬
ence, that of Eastern Europeans during the years of communist rule.
Mojzes provides us with sufficient background on the worldview and
ecclesial structure of Orthodox Christianity to help us understand the
sufferings of Christians under a regime that deprived them not only
of the devotional comforts of everyday life but of access to the liturgy,
the center of Orthodoxy. Mojzes elaborates on the realities of life for
Orthodox Christians in the Soviet Union—the place of the laity within
 Multiplicity and Ambiguity | Bednarowski 23

the framework of the church; their modes of survival when not only
employment but sometimes life itself was at stake if one were detected
en8aging in outward practices of piety. He describes an intriguing
inversion of power that is often a part of the peoples history—that
the tradition was preserved by those with the least to lose, the least
powerful, and, therefore, ironically empowered in their powerlessness
to safeguard the faith and its practices for their children and grand¬
children when the time came—as it did—that they could once again
be public about their faith. The rapidity with which Orthodox Chris¬
tianity was resurrected in the countries of the former Soviet Union
offers evidence as to how close to the surface it had remained, however
invisible to onlookers both outside and inside.
Mark Noll and Ethan Sanders outline a peoples history of North
American evangelicalism with a focus on prayer, worship (particu¬
larly music), and material culture. They demonstrate how pervasive
evangelical piety is within North American society, how attuned it
is to popular culture, and where it fits within the broader framework
of American Protestantism. Evangelicalism is “entrepreneurial,” they
say, in matters of worship and music and in the growth of “Christian
retail,” even though ordinary evangelicals have retained and adapted
traditional practices of intercessory prayer, reliance on born-again
experiences, and the wisdom of the Bible. They predict that the future
of North American evangelical worship and piety is tied to “the vola¬
tile evangelical dance with American popular culture” and to what
is happening in the rest of world evangelicalism—in sub-Saharan
Africa, China, Korea, the Pacific Islands. Most pivotal, they predict,
is how evangelicals negotiate their “twin but sometimes competing
strengths”—connection to the historic tradition and the impulse to
adjust the faith to new realities.
Luis Rivera-Pagan grounds his study of the growing attraction of
Pentecostalism for Latin Americans in a classic anthropological text
by Stanley W. Mintz, Worker in the Cane: A Puerto Rican Life History
(1960), whose astonishment at Taso Zayas conversion to Pentecos¬
talism has been ignored by most scholars. Rivera-Pagan places Taso
within the context of the brutal life of cane workers to interpret why
his conversion is a story of “extraordinary healing, both physical and
spiritual” and a transformation of identity, family life, and purpose
24 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

in the world. Rivera-Pagan does not romanticize Tasos life after his
conversion or that of his common-law wife, Elizabeth. Taso and his
family never escaped their poverty or a life of unending physical labor,
but they experienced new life nonetheless. Rivera-Pagan generalizes
from Tasos story to explain why Pentecostalism speaks to so many
of the poor of Latin America. “Religion matters in Latin America,”
says Rivera-Pagan. “And it matters even more in its increasing and
astounding variety.” He speaks, also, to controversies about whether
Pentecostal religion offers a worldly or unworldly religious worldview
in Latin America, suggesting a need to redefine what historians and
theologians mean by those concepts. Neither one seems adequate on
its own to explain what is happening.
Bruce Forbes analyzes how a biblical theme—the Apocalypse
and the struggle between good and evil (and, more broadly, Ameri¬
can Christianity’s apocalyptic expectations)—crosses the boundaries
of institutional Christianity and shapes the imagination of popular
culture. He focuses on apocalyptic fiction as it is manifested in the
immensely popular Left Behind series, cowboy narratives (the tradi¬
tional “western”), and tales of superheroes in comic books. He argues
that if we stop with explorations of traditional Christian theologies
of apocalypticism and millennialism, we will never understand the
popularity of this theme in the public imagination. “What the gen¬
eral public really believes,” he says, “often finds expression more in
the trends of popular culture than in the statements of elite, formal
theologians.”
Jean-Paul Wiest’s chapter on Catholicism at the end of the twenti¬
eth century in China is somewhat more institutionally oriented—the
Chinese government and the Vatican—than the other essays in this
book. But it points to the complexities of Catholicism’s situation in
China at the very end of the twentieth century and the beginning of
the twenty-first, and the pressures that ordinary Chinese Catholics
have to negotiate as a result. Ironies and conflicts abound when, as
Wiest explains, increasing numbers of Chinese Catholics belong to the
“large gray area” between the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association
(the CCPA) recognized by the government and the underground, or
hidden, church. Wiest views the two as one church, however wounded
it is by the dichotomy. He points to marks of Chinese Catholic piety
 Multiplicity and Ambiguity I Bednarowski 25

that transcend the division and the extent to which priests, sisters,
and “ordinary Christians” face risks while working for reconcilia¬
tion. Wiest’s analysis reinforces the people’s history discovery that an
understanding of Catholicism in China focused only on the struggle
between two mammoth institutions will come nowhere near telling
the whole story.
In her chapter on existential ritualizing in contemporary Sweden,
Valerie DeMarinis speculates that although Christianity appears to
be declining in the West, particularly in Western Europe, looking at
peoples history makes us more inclined to ask not, “Why is religion
going away?” but “What new forms is religion taking?” She demon¬
strates that those who have departed from traditional observance in
the state Lutheran church nonetheless have a need for spiritual depth
in their lives and for ritual celebration, or at least marking, of signifi¬
cant aspects of their lives. They work to create a vital worldview using
components from both religion and nature. Further, says DeMarinis,
the process of forced migration is bringing more privatized and secu¬
larized cultures such as Sweden into direct contact with a wide variety
of cultures and worldviews that raise challenges to an unreflected-upon
religious Protestantism and the cultural value assumptions under¬
pinning worldviews, gender construction, tolerance, and religious
freedom. The people she studies are all members of nonprofessional
groups trying to make existential sense out of unplanned chaos, and in
an intriguing cross-pollination of disciplines, it appears to be mental
health professionals who are becoming as acutely aware of the need for
ritualizing as are those who are part of the church.
The chapters in part 3, Innovation and Authenticity, offer exam¬
ples of how peoples history can illuminate the efforts of twentieth-
century Christians to respond to dilemmas and opportunities in their
daily lives that require new ways of thinking and acting as Christians:
family realities, work, personal identity crises, relationships with
other Christians, inevitable and “ordinary” crises of life and death. It
is not always, or even often, easy to discern what is both innovative
and authentic. And “authentic” here means not clearly “right” (rather
than obviously “wrong”) but flowing in recognizable ways, however
diverse they may be, from the deep wells of Christian scripture, tra¬
dition, and history. Such authenticity is, in fact, part of the appeal
26 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

of peoples history. In demonstrating both the multiplicity and the

ambiguity of Christianity, it points to the depth and the breadth of
the tradition as well.
There are nonetheless tragic moments in a peoples history of
Christianity in the twentieth century when all emphasis on ambiguity
must be cast aside. Victoria Barnett’s chapter about ordinary Chris¬
tians in Nazi Germany before and during the Holocaust depicts the
distorted use of theological innovation for the sake of upholding the
power of cultural ideology and state power. The result was a drastic
failure of authenticity. She analyzes the “cautious accommodation”
of institutional Protestantism and Catholicism to the Nazi state that
failed to resist anti-Jewish policies. In
her focus on ordinary Christians—both
bystanders and rescuers—she points to
widespread active and passive complic¬
ity in the Nazi regime and the reality
that help for persecuted Jews often came
from Christians on the margins in vari¬
ous ways, many of them women, rather
than from church leaders.
Patrick Henry relates how ordinary
people, theologians and laypeople alike,
have moved ecumenism into the every¬
day lives of Christians much faster than
the official ecumenical agreements and
bilateral dialogues of denominations
and faith and order commissions. This
is a grassroots ecumenism fostered by
the issues of daily life—intermarriage,
relationships with colleagues and neigh¬
Fig. 0.6. The Crucifixion by bors, and collaboration in social justice work with churches from
Jim Colclough (c. 1970). Gift
of Herbert Waide Hemphill
other denominations in the same neighborhood. The virtues needed
Jr., Hemphill Collection. for ecumenism, says Henry, are new in one sense and ancient and
Photo: © Smithsonian
American Art Museum,
very everyday in another: courtesy, common sense, listening to each
Washington, D.C, Hemphill / other’s stories “with the ear of the heart,” as the Benedictines put
Art Resource, N.Y. Used
by permission. it, and having a sense of humor. Grassroots ecumenism often gets
its start at the kitchen table rather than in official meeting places.
 Multiplicity and Ambiguity | Bednarowski 27

Its insights and accomplishments

offer previews of a Christianity that "Perhaps the World Ends Here" / Joy Harjo
will be postdenominational: more
unified but not necessarily lack¬ The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what,
ing the distinctive characteristics we must eat to live.
of its various branches. Recall the The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the

prayers of gratitude for Orthodox table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.

Christians and Methodists at the We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe
at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.
beginning of the chapter. Margaret
It is here that children are given instructions on what it
O’Gara speaks of this phenomenon
means to be human. We make men at it, we make
as “the ecumenical gift exchange,”
women.
in a book by the same name,22 a
At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts
reality that has by no means come
of lovers.
totally to fruition but whose spirit
Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms
can be discerned in the stories around our children. They laugh with us at our poor
Henry tells. falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back
Margaret Bendroths chapter on together once again at the table.
gender in twentieth-century Chris¬ This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in
tianity relates issues of gender to the sun.

the recent scholarly “discovery” of Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place

gender as an essential category of to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate

the terrible victory.
analysis for understanding religion
We have given birth on this table, and have prepared
and to how assumptions about
our parents for burial here.
gender identity affect the daily
At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of
lives of Christians. As scholars of
suffering and remorse. We give thanks.
women’s history have been point¬
Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table,
ing out over the last forty years, we
while we are laughing and crying, eating of the
cannot adequately understand a last sweet bite.
religious worldview or the experi¬
ences of people who embrace it —"Perhaps the World Ends Here" from
without asking, “What is it like to The Woman Who Fell from the Sky by Joy Harjo.
be a woman in this tradition?” and Copyright © 1994 by Joy Harjo. Used by permission of

“What is it like to be a man?” Ben- W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

droth looks at how gender issues

have played out in different parts of the world and how the lives of
both women and men have been circumscribed by inflexible expec¬
tations about what they must do or what they cannot do based on
28 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

gender. This is one of those issues that forces historians to keep one
foot in the past and one in the future. Bendroth places importance in
this chapter on the “family claim” as a constantly recurring theme in
different eras of Christianity. She concludes by acknowledging that
when it comes to gender, “here emerge some of the deepest, most
puzzling questions about what it means to be human, to be at once
independent and responsive to the needs of others.” Those daunting
questions—now that scholars and ordinary people have become aware
enough to ask them!—can be just as intractable at the kitchen table as
they are in boardrooms or the sanctuaries of established religions.
Oscar Cole-Arnal takes on labor and social justice movements
in Canada from a comparative perspective: Social Gospel Protestants
in western Canada and urban Roman Catholicism in Quebec. His
account begins with an angry gathering of farmers in 1901 in what
became the province of Saskatchewan. They were protesting the
price manipulations by railroad barons, bankers, and international
grain exchanges to make more profit by depriving wheat farmers
of fair prices for their grain. This is a narrative of agricultural and
urban poverty and exploitation and of the activists, both laypeople
and clergy, who worked to change those realities that so powerfully
affected the daily lives of farmers and factory workers. Interwoven
in the details of Cole-Arnal’s dual account are politics of the insti¬
tutional church and people, with radicals and conservatives among
clergy and laity, some of them resisting change and some of them
fomenting it. It is not a story in which the work of clergy and laity
is easily distinguished, but it is a compelling illustration of the com¬
plexities of people’s history.
Cristina Traina analyzes popular Catholic manuals on sexuality
and marriage over three different periods in the twentieth century. She
looks into the bases on which Catholic writers, many of them celibate,
negotiated popular, cultural understandings of “good” sexuality and
its place in marriage, and tried to find ways to make them conform to
Catholic teachings. As the century wore on, the insights of psycholo¬
gists and biologists became more prominent in these conversations,
and Traina illustrates how devoted Catholics felt themselves to be at
the mercy of not-very-understanding experts in regard to the inti¬
mate relationships in their lives. Ordinary people came to be defiant
 Multiplicity and Ambiguity | Bednarowski 29

of official prescriptions as they came into conflict with the realities

they experienced in the privacy of those lives. Traina’s story is about
the evolution of official Roman Catholic teaching on sexuality”
over the course of the twentieth century, but “it also reflects just as
strongly ethnic Catholic assimilation and coming-of-age in American
culture.”
Ann Pederson catalogues the dilemmas faced by ordinary people
when they encounter the complexities of life’s beginnings and endings
at the close of the twentieth century when it became clear, because of
advances in science and medicine, that these experiences are no lon¬
ger discernible moments but processes. Their unfoldings are fraught
with uncertainly and dissent, both individual and cultural. In many
cases the advice of experts, religious or medical, does not suffice. The
experts in these two arenas are often bewildered themselves, because
their separate realms of expertise have not kept pace with each other
in terms of ethical dilemmas and can therefore be very difficult to
relate to each other. Pedersons particular setting is the American
midwestern state of South Dakota—atypical, or at least distinctive,
in some respects, as she points out, but whose citizens are nonethe¬
less beset by dilemmas around beginnings and endings of life that are
familiar to most Christians.

LIVING CHRISTIANITY
Christian history takes on a new vitality when historians embrace the
multiple and ongoing stories of people all over the globe for whom
Christianity is a living tradition. This new kind of history opens up the
everyday realities of Christians that have been concealed by theologi¬
cal abstractions, too-neatly-framed timelines, typologies that suggest
stasis rather than dynamism and unquestioned assumptions about
what elements of Christian history are significant enough to record.
All that said, it is not the aim of people’s history to toss out theology,
timelines, and working assumptions. It is obvious from the chapters
in this book that such a move would not only be unwise; it would be
impossible. What the peoples histories in this volume demonstrate is
the need for many approaches and emphases. We need statistics and
30 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

maps, like the one on pages 32-33, to keep before us the big picture of
how concentrations of Christians in the world have changed between
1900 and 2000. This broad scope motivates the kinds of questions that
have dominated both scholarly and popular sources at the end of the
twentieth century—not only “whither Christianity” but “Whose Reli¬
gion Is Christianity?” The latter is the title of a well-known book by
Lamin Sanneh, a professor of missions and world Christianity at Yale
University, and its specific focus is evident in the subtitle: The Gospel
beyond the West.23 His question, though, is applicable in a much more
general way and across a variety of national, international, theological,
and institutional boundaries. And it is a question that authors of these
chapters respond to from many different perspectives.
Writing people’s history and reading it, as well, requires a willing¬
ness not just to expand our repertoire of historical sources and to be
receptive to new questions. It is an enterprise that demands an agility
in the entertaining of different, and sometimes competing, angles of
vision. The very specific stories that undergird people’s history chal¬
lenge us to see how the local and the global, the universal and the
particular, the cosmic and the domestic are inter-twined with each
other. In her poem, “Perhaps the World Ends Here,” Muscogee Indian
poet Joy Harjo evokes just this juxtaposition but also the integration
of the cosmic and the domestic, the very local and the vastly global,
the living out of daily routines and their much wider significance that
are so much a part of the spirit of a people’s history of Christianity.
“The world begins at a kitchen table,” she writes. “No matter what,
we must eat to live.” Harjo catalogues the whole of human history,
people’s history, unfolding around the table—bringing gifts, chasing
dogs and chickens away, instructing children, giving birth, “prepar¬
ing our parents for burial.” She depicts the kitchen table as the place
where wars are begun and ended: “It is a place to hide in the shadow of
terror. /A place to celebrate the terrible victory.” She concludes with a
poignant speculation that combines the ordinary and the apocalyptic
but it is an apocalyptic whose arena has been domesticated without
being tamed of its powerful meaning: “Perhaps the world will end at
the kitchen table, while we are laugh-/ing and crying, eating of the
last sweet bite.”24 In the people’s histories that follow there are similar
striking combinations of the local and the global that promote fresh
 Multiplicity and Ambiguity | Bednarowski 31

understandings of the depth and breadth of the recent Christian past

and of the fact that it is a living and often surprisingly self-renewing
tradition.

FOR FURTHER READING

Bamat, Tomas, and Jean-Paul Wiest, eds. Popular Catholicism in a World Church: Seven
Case Studies in Inculturation. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1999.
Chidester, David. Christianity: A Global History. New York: HarperCollins, 2000.
Healey, Joseph and Donald Sybertz. Towards an African Narrative Theology. Maryknoll,
N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1996.
Jenkins, Philip. The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
McLeod, Hugh, ed. World Christianities c.1914-c. 2000. Cambridge History of Christi¬
anity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Moore, Rebecca. Voices of Christianity: A Global Introduction. Boston: McGraw Hill,
2005.
Thistlethwaite, Susan Brooks, and Mary Potter Engel, eds. Lift Every Voice: Constructing
Christian Theologies from the Underside. Revised and Expanded Edition. Mary¬
knoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1998.
 251 Million

Top ten Christian-populated

country in 1900*
Top ten Christian-populated
country in 2005*

Percentage of Christians
by Region in 1900 and 2005 167 Million

Oceania 1% Africa 2%

Asia 4%
North America
14%

Latin America
11%

558 million Christians

equal 34.5% of worlds
SOUTH
1900 population in 1900.
AMERICA

Oceania 1%
North America
13%

2.134 billion Christians

equal 33% of worlds

2005 population in 2005.

SOURCES:
* Christianity in Global Context: Trends and Statistics, Todd M. Johnson, Ph.D., Director, Center for the Study of Global Christianity,
Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary; Prepared for the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life; $Christianity,, by the Numbers.
Tidings Online, February 4, 2005 by George Weigel, Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Washington, D.C.

2008 LUCIDITY INFORMATION DESIGN, IJX

MiUi
FRAN'

AUSTRALIA

Percentage of Christians by Affiliation in 1900 and 2005*

>

2005

Orthodox 9.8%
THE AUTHORITY
OF NEW VOICES
FILIPINO POPULAR
CHRISTIANITY

ELEAZAR S. FERNANDEZ
CHAPTER ONE

M iguel de la Cruz, a jeepney driver in Metro Manila, sets aside as

a panata (vow) a portion of his meager daily income to buy a
garland of sampaguitas (jasmine) every day to decorate the image of
the Black Nazarene that is mounted on the dashboard of his jeepney.
Also, every Friday Miguel goes to Quiapo Church to light a few can¬
dles, recite the rosary, and wipe the feet of the Black Nazarene with
his towel, which he wraps around his neck all day. Another towel (also
used to wipe the feet of the Black Nazarene) he keeps at his house. The
towel, he believes, has received some power from the Black Nazarene
that can bring both protection and good luck for him and his family.1
Miguel’s form of religiosity is not uniquely his. He shares this kind of
piety with many Filipinos, particularly those classified by Philippine
society as the common tao (person) or the lowly ones.
As in most sociohistorical accounts, the history of the common
people often remains unarticulated. This is particularly true of the
religious experience, thoughts, and practices of the vast number of
ordinary Christian believers. It is ironic that the day-to-day Chris¬
tianity that informs the lives of common people does not fall within
the orbit of the dominant theological discourse. A clerical and class
bias against the religious worldview and practices of the common
people seems to persist. By no means does this suggest that this kind
of religiosity is totally absent among the upper class. It should not be
a surprise if clergy and theological scholars (whether Roman Catho¬
lics or Protestants), who were trained mostly under the Enlighten¬
ment paradigm, manifest certain distrust toward the more effusive,

37
38 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

spontaneous, emotional, symbolic,

mythic, and cultic practices of the com¬
mon people. Many liturgical renewal
movements continue to reflect this
bias against common people’s religious
expressions. Even those who claim to
articulate a people’s theology often fail
to take into serious account the religious
worldview and practices of the common
people. Liberation theologians are not
exempt from this peculiar bias against
popular religious expressions.2
Fig. 1,1. Jeepney is the What is happening in the larger theological discourse is also true
primary mode of land trans¬
portation in the Philippines. in the Philippines. The general Enlightenment and class bias against
It is a Filipino adaptation the religious expressions of the common people, often labeled as
of the original U.S. military
jeep. Photo © Josephine A. ignorantes y pobres, is present. To be sure these religious expressions
Fernandez. Used by have been tolerated, if not given blessings, by the church hierarchy,
permission.
which continues to view them as inferior to official Christianity. They
are prevalent in the day-to-day lives of the people, but official Christi¬
anity confines them to the periphery. In spite of this marginalization,
these expressions have not only continued to exist but also gained
vitality. Thus, alongside official church teachings, the religious expres¬
sions of the common people exist. Philippine literature calls it “folk
Christianity.”
I concur with Orlando Espin that popular Christianity can be
understood as a vehicle of the people’s “faith-full intuitions” or as “cul¬
tural expression of the sensusfidelium”3 In other words, popular Chris¬
tianity is an expression of the common people’s religious experience.
Underlying popular Christianity is an implicit theology, a concrete
expression of a transcendent God that points to a way of understand¬
ing as well as doing theology. The last portion of this essay—humility
in discerning the theologies of the lowly ones—is my attempt to lift
up and give voice to the scattered theological gems of the common
people. This should be interpreted not as a wholesale endorsement of
every expression of Filipino popular religiosity, but as an invitation to
consider it a subject that matters. Regardless of how one views popular
religious expressions, they demand our thoughtful engagement.
 Filipino Popular Christianity Fernandez 39

COLONIALIZATION AND CHRISTIANIZATION

Wherever there was colonization there was Christian mission. For
those steeped in the worldview of the fifteenth and sixteenth centu¬
ries, the alliance between colonialism and mission should not be a
surprise. No Roman Catholic or Protestant ruler of the period would
imagine that in conquering and acquiring other nations he was only
advancing his political hegemony. It was taken for granted that the
conquered and colonized people must also be missionized. Mission
and colonization were inseparable: To colonize was to missionize, and
to missionize was to colonize.4
This kind of alliance between colonizing powers and Christian¬
ity was at work in the Philippines, in the presence of both the Span¬
iards and the U.S. imperialists. Christianity arrived on the Philippine
shores along with Western colonization. With the arrival of Fernando
Magallanes (March 16, 1521), Christianity was brought to the Philip¬
pine shores. On Easter Sunday of that same year, historical accounts
say that Magallanes celebrated the first Mass on the island of Lima-
sawa. Magallanes proceeded to the island of Cebu, where Christian¬
ity made its first major advancement. King Humabon of Cebu and
his household (including eight hundred subjects) were baptized. As
a baptismal gift, one historical account says, the Spaniards gave the
queen a wooden statue of the Child Jesus (Santo Nino).5 The next
wave of Spanish conquistadors followed and colonized more areas,
planting not only Spanish rule but also Roman Catholic Christianity.
What the Spaniards found when they arrived in the Philippines
was a world stabilized by a religious cosmology that provided an
overarching framework for the community’s social structure. The rela¬
tionship between social subjects reflected the wider cosmic scheme of
relationship. The day-to-day life of the natives revolved around a world
inhabited by powerful invisible spirits and their intermediaries. At the
top of the cosmic world was the Supreme Being, popularly called
Bathala, the all-powerful creator (Puong Maykapal) whose abode was
the sky. The Bathala had intermediaries on earth called anitos (spirits).
There were varieties of anitos with specific assignments: fishing and
navigation, battlefields, health, nursing mothers, lovers, and so forth.
And like their Asian neighbors, the early Filipinos had high regard for
40 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

their ancestors: They were given anito status and were called upon to
intercede on the peoples behalf with Bathala. Performing the religious
rituals of the people were priests and priestesses called katalona or
babailan (babaylan).
Basic knowledge of this religious cosmology is crucial to under¬
standing why certain popular religious beliefs and practices have
evolved into their current forms. In other words, without this basic
knowledge we would not be able to recognize the creative process at
work in current expressions of popular religiosity.

THE MAKING OF FILIPINO POPULAR CHRISTIANITY

Filipino popular Christianity is a product of the encounter between
Christianity and indigenous Filipino culture and religion. One may
view this encounter as an encontronazo (clash) between a more pow¬
erful force and a less powerful one, but the clash did not result in the
total acceptance of everything foreign or in the abdication of every¬
thing indigenous.6 The Filipinos, says historian John Leddy Phelan,
were no mere passive recipients of the socioreligious and political
package imposed on them by the Spanish colonialists. No doubt
Christianity was brought to them, if not imposed on them. But under
the circumstances they had considerable freedom in selecting their
responses to Hispanization, ranging from acceptance to indifference
and even rejection.7 If there was considerable freedom under the cir¬
cumstances, then the Filipinos’ acceptance of the new and foreign faith
suggests openness on their part. Scholar of religion Aloysius Pieris
attributes this openness to the prevalence of “cosmic religion” (a form
of religion whose main foundation is the cosmic elements or forces
of nature, pejoratively referred to as “animism”) and the absence of
metacosmic soteriologies (for example, notions of salvation or of the
highest good—summum bonum—such as nirvana) among indigenous
Filipinos before the arrival of the Spaniards, except in some places
in the south (Mindanao) where Islam had taken earlier and stronger
root. This is not the case in other parts of Asia, for example, where
non-Christian metacosmic soteriologies constituted the main edifice
of the people’s worldview as a result of the strong presence of Islam,
 Filipino Popular Christianity I Fernandez 41

Buddhism, and to some extent Taoism.8 Whatever theoretical frame¬

work one uses to take account of this openness, Christianity found
general reception among early inhabitants of the Philippines.
It appears from the consensus among scholars that the Christian¬
ization of Filipinos was not a one-way imposition but a double process
of conversion. The adoption of Christianity by the early Filipinos, con¬
tends Steffi San Buenaventura, involved a “conversion process that was
more complex than a simple procedure of removal and replacement
of faith.”9 James Alexander Robertson argues for a similar point: “The
readiness with which the early Filipinos embraced the Faith does not
mean that the old forms and beliefs were discarded in their entirety,
nor that they have yet altogether disappeared.”10 This complex double
process of conversion has given birth to Filipino popular Christian¬
ity. Lest it be interpreted as a finished product, popular Christianity
continues to develop new forms in response to the contemporary
socioeconomic and political challenges. Filipino popular Christianity
has even traveled with the Filipino diaspora in this era of heightened
globalization.11
The Roman Catholic Church has officially recognized and shown
growing sensitivity to the religious expressions of the common
people, though deep-seated attitudes take time to change. Regard¬
less of the attitude of the church hierarchy, popular Christianity has
continued to flourish, such as Misa de
Gallo (Dawn Masses), Flores de Mayo
(Flower Festival in May), santdkrusan
(Search for the Cross), panata (vow),
sinakulo (Passion play), lamay (wake at
home), and fiesta. Popular images have
also flourished with a widening number
of devotees; these include Santo Nino
(Floly Child), Santo Cristo (the Cruci¬
fied Christ), Santo Entiero (the Holy
Corpse), Nazareno (Black Christ), and
images of Mary, the mother of Jesus.
To be sure, folk Christianity is predominantly a Roman Catholic Fig. 1.2. The Suffering
... , T-, , . . r*’*i * • Christ, San Agustin Church,
phenomenon, but it is not totally absent among Protestant Filipinos Manila. Photo ©EleazarS.
and other nativistic socioreligious movements.12 Though they are Fernandez. Used by
permission.
42 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

overshadowed by the Roman Catholic majority, Protestants and other

nativistic movements share the same soil (indigenous belief system)
that has given birth to Roman Catholic popu¬

Fiesta lar Christianity. A study by F. Landa Jocano of

Fiesta is a gesture of respect and self¬ Malitbog (Panay Island) reveals the presence of
esteem for many Filipinos. It is a time folk Christianity even among Protestants.13 San
of showing appreciation to the saints Buenaventura’s observation is accurate that folk
for favors or blessings received. It is Christianity has been a “convenient conduit that
an occasion for establishing social has allowed many Filipinos to cross the insti¬
position and cementing social rela¬ tutional boundaries between the two Christian
tions. Also, it is an occasion for pay¬ religions [Roman Catholic and Protestant], if
ing back debts of gratitude (utang na not because of dogma, certainly for cultural rea¬
loob).
sons.”14 Many Protestants, for example, celebrate
—Tomas Andres and Pilar llada-
fiesta (primarily in honor of a patron saint) not
Andres, Understanding the Filipino
because of dogma but because it is part of their
(Quezon City, Philippines:
social world. Of course, more evangelical forms
New Day, 1987), 35.
of Protestant Christianity have strong prophetic
pronouncements against fiesta celebration.

SOME EXPRESSIONS OF CREATIVE INTERWEAVING

Filipino popular Christianity demonstrates the peoples creative inter¬
pretation and appropriation of Christianity, which suggests not only
their conversion to the new faith but also the transformation of Chris¬
tianity. It is a creative localization or contextualization of Christianity
by common Filipinos. This is not meant to suggest that this creative
interpretation and appropriation process is always liberating, but I
venture to say that it must be making sense or that it resonates with
the lived experience of the people. When we associate reason only
with logical consistency, we may not the see the creative reason of the
common people that is attuned to the complex and mysterious. For
common Filipinos, mystery is not something to be solved but calls
for a posture of wonder and surrender. When logical inconsistency
appears, they do not have the same impatience of a Western educated
person. The answer they normally give is (in Tagalog) “Ganyan talaga
yan” (It is really like that, or That is what reality is).15
 Filipino Popular Christianity Fernandez 43

A WORLD OF SPIRITS
Filipino popular Christianity has evolved into its current expression
because it reflects the worldview of the people. Through their faithful
intuitions the common people integrated their worldview into their
new faith. At home in a cosmology with a hierarchy of supernatural
beings and intermediaries, Filipinos arrived at religious beliefs and
practices that matched their cosmology: they replaced their anitos
with images of Christian saints and converted their magaanito rituals
into veneration of saints. As there were anitos for every major human
activity, there are now saints for specific human activities or specific
favors: a saint for workers, for farmers, for travelers, as well as for ster¬
ile mothers who desire to have children and for finding a good hus¬
band.16 With a familial structure reflective of this cosmology, Mary as
a way to Jesus is a prominent feature of popular Christianity.17
Familiar with a world inhabited by powerful spirits that affect
ones life, common Filipinos evolved a form of Christian religiosity
that is fully cognizant of their presence. In walking through a forest
one has to ask permission from the spirits (panabitabi) to be allowed
to go through, or one has to ask permission before wading into the
lake for fishing. Popular Christianity, in spite of modern challenges,
has retained this sense of harmony with nature and the spirits. It may
be true that this reverence of the spirits is mixed with fear, but the
dominant attitude to the created world is one of harmony with it.
Moreover, common Filipinos are at home in a world that can¬
not conceive of a space that is not sacred, for there is no separation
between the sacred and the secular. As a result, popular Christianity
has developed a religiosity encompassing the whole gamut of life while
breaking down the wall that separates sacred and secular. The peoples
religiosity goes with them at all times and places and cannot be con¬
fined within church walls or to officially sanctioned church liturgies.
This religiosity is not measured in how often one goes to church and
participates in its official life. This religiosity is practiced by people
who rarely go to church or by those who may go to church only for
their own binyag (baptism), kasal (wedding), and libing (funeral). We
see this religiosity in gestures that common people make when they
perform the sign of the cross when passing by a cemetery or a church,
44 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

or when they utter their memorized prayers while in a bus or a boat.

They say buyag (from the Cebuano language—to counter bad luck
that an evil spirit may bring) when someone expresses something
admirable (for example, “Your baby girl is beautiful!”). From major
points in the life cycle to livelihood, relationship with either the living
or the dead, constructing an edifice, traveling, inviting good fortunes,
and so on, Filipinos have evolved a comprehensive and elaborate set
of religious beliefs and practices.
Filipinos’ acute awareness of the precariousness of life, whether
brought by natural disasters (sometimes not purely natural) or human
destructiveness, has given birth to a distinct popular religiosity. Fili¬
pino popular Christianity revolves around adapting life to the contin¬
gencies of living, especially living in harmony with the forces beyond
oneself. A community’s significant experience, whether positive or
negative (flood, epidemic, bountiful harvest, and so on), gets carved in
the collective memory and finds expression in some religious beliefs
and observances. One example is the fiesta in honor of San Isidro
(May 15), the patron of good harvest. In farming communities where
the fiesta celebration includes a procession into the fields, the religious
leader or priest blesses the fields, either as an expression of gratitude
for a good harvest or as a petition for good harvest through the inter¬
cession of San Isidro to God.18

FILIPINO NOTIONS OF DESTINY AND HUMAN AGENCY

If Filipinos general attitude to the world is one in harmony with
forces beyond their full control, how do we discern human agency in
this context? There are many elements in popular culture and religion
that support the idea of resignation to fate or to God’s mysterious
purpose. The overall religious climate points to a common belief that
everything happens within the purview of God’s power and purposes,
and within God’s own time. Higher power is always involved, giving
or withholding blessings as well as punishing. If something is not
realized, one may say in Cebuano: “ Wala itugot sa kahitas-an” (The
all-powerful God did not grant it) or “Dili pa iyang panahon” (Its
time has not yet come). This “time” is more than chronos. It is God’s
 Filipino Popular Christianity I Fernandez 45

providential time. Or rather than being proactive, one may let the
circumstances define the outcome. In this case, whatever the outcome
must be Gods answer. The outcome may be negative, but who would
dare to disagree with God?
Two of the popular attitudes toward the world—gulong ng palad
(wheel of fortune) and bahala na (what will be will be)—reinforce an
attitude of resignation or fatalism. In the wheel of life there are times
when one is up and at other times down. Caught in what appears to be
an inevitable fate, common Filipinos can think of life only as kapalaran
(a life dictated by the lines on the palm of ones hands) or gulong ng
palad. When this fatalistic worldview is compounded with economic
hardships, such as having a family of eight children with only P250.00
(U.S. $5) a day salary, what else is there to say but “bahala na”?
There are, however, other aspects of Filipino culture and religion
that seem to bring balance to fatalism or resignation. Yes, Gods will
and time set the overall frame, but human effort is also considered
crucial: in Tagalog, ‘Na sa Dios ang awa, na sa tao ang gawa” (Mercy
comes from God, but labor belongs to humans). Even the term bahala
na may have a positive spin. It could mean total surrender to God,
as in bahala na ang Dios (It is up to God whatever the outcome be),
which may have been derived from the word Ba[t]hala (God).19 It
may be due to the people’s belief in Bathalas lavish generosity, accord¬
ing to Jocano, that the dominant risk-taking and venturesome trait of
Filipinos arose: “Bathala will always take care.”20
The Cebuano compound word panimpalad offers a good example
of the integration of the Filipino venturesome spirit with the rec-
ognition of a power beyond one’s control. Panim suggests personal
agency (effort, determination, and taking risk), while palad suggests
submission to one’s palad (the lines on the palms of ones hands) or
to a power beyond one’s control (God). It is this spirit of panimpalad
that has propelled Filipinos to leave their familiar village in the prov¬
inces and go to the already crowded urban areas of Metro Manila,
Cebu City, or Davao City in search of a better life. Likewise, it is this
panimpalad spirit that has driven Filipinos, in spite of the many sto¬
ries of maltreatment from their employers, to work in Hong Kong
or Singapore as domestic helpers or in the Middle East as contract
workers.
46 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

FINDING HUMANITY IN COMMUNITY

Filipino popular religiosity is generally a familial and communal
affair: it is tied to the strengthening of communal relation. Fiesta,
for example, more than thanksgiving in honor of a patron saint, is
for building the social network. It is an expression of social obliga¬
tion, social status, and a debt of gratitude (utang na loob), as well as
a gesture of extravagant hospitality. This fiesta hospitality extends
not only to friends but also to strangers. Even those who can hardly
afford a regular meal go to the extent of borrowing money to prepare
for the big fiesta celebration that covers two days or more. Critics of
the fiesta celebration point to this negative aspect. A Filipino wisdom
saying offers this warning: in Tagalog, “Ubos-ubos biyaya, pagkatapos
nakatunganga” (Spend lavishly, and you end up with nothing; in a
more literal translation, Spend all your blessings, and you end up not
only with nothing but also not knowing what to
do [nakatunganga]).
On Suffering
Baptismal and wedding ceremonies also pro¬
Suffering is a pervasive theme among
vide occasions for extending one’s social network
Filipinos. It is not a surprise that the
through the compadrazco system. The more spon¬
suffering Jesus has an important
sors (ninong [godfather] and ninang [godmother])
place among them. This has served
Filipinos in at least two ways: either
one has, the wider ones social network becomes.
to make them accept the harsh reali¬ As extensions of the family, it is assumed that
ties of life or to strengthen them in ninong and ninang provide religious and moral
their struggle for a new humanity. guidance to the child or the newlywed couple. But
The power wielders no doubt have there is more to this: the sponsors are extensions
used the suffering and passive Jesus of the family in times of crisis or when their influ¬
to continue their control of the status ence is needed, such as in finding a job or facilitat¬
quo. Nevertheless, the suffering but ing certain transactions.
struggling Jesus is not absent. The
The communal dimension of Filipino popular
suffering but struggling Jesus, the
religiosity is likewise visible during the day of the
inspirer of those who are struggling,
dead (All Saints Day). Filipino communal life
is discernible in many instances in the
extends to both the living and the dead. All Saints
history of the Filipino people.
Day in the Philippines is like a fiesta, except that
—Eleazar S. Fernandez, Toward a
Theology of Struggle (Maryknoll, N.Y.:
the main venue of the celebration is the cemetery,
Orbis Books, 1994), 102-3. where people stay until late at night. Meals are
prepared and brought to the cemetery not only for
 Filipino Popular Christianity | Fernandez 47

the living (family members and friends) but also for the long dead. Fil¬
ipinos believe that when their own time comes, they will be together
with their departed loved ones, who are waiting in the kabilang-buhay
(other life/world).
In these religious observances it seems that Filipino popular
Christianity provides teaching moments on how to be human. It is not
only enough to exist as human (tao), but one must know how to be
human (magpakatao) and to be human-in-relation (makipagkapwa-
tao). Makipagkapwa-tao maybe understood in a limited sense as paki-
kisama (being in harmony with others) or in a larger and nobler sense
as establishing right relation with fellow human beings. The journey to
be truly human is, of course, not an easy one. A well-known Filipino
saying (in Tagalog) puts it this way: “Madaling maging tao, ngunit
marihap magpakatao” (It is easy to be a man/woman, but difficult to
make oneself human). Interpretations can take many angles, but they
all point to the value of social relations.21

SUFFERING CHRIST, SUFFERING FILIPINOS

In a country where suffering is the lot of the masses, it is not sur¬
prising, says Benigno Beltran, that “the image of the Crucified One,
head bowed, mouth agape in excruciating agony, provides consola¬
tion and an outlet for pent-up emotions of sympathy and tragedy for
the ignorant and the heavy-laden.” The image of the Crucified God,
continues Beltran, “increases the resolve to survive. ... In the sight
of the Cross, Christians live in acceptance and trust in the suffering
God who remains faithful in his love for the sinful human beings.”22
Since suffering is a pervasive narrative in peoples lives and the Cru¬
cified or the Suffering One a pervasive icon, it is not surprising that
Holy Week occupies a central place in the church’s calendar. Perhaps
more than Christmas Eve Mass, the Good Friday event draws a huge
crowd—many of whom do not go to church on regular Sundays—on
an extremely hot day to participate in an unusually long religious cere¬
mony. This is generally true also of the Protestant churches.
Several Holy Week activities portray in vivid ways the suffering
and agony that the Son of God endured. The pasyon (reenactment
48 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

of life and death of Jesus

through plays and read¬
ings) portrays the poor,
lowly, and beaten Christ.
This practice is more prev¬
alent in certain parts of
the Philippines, such as
the Tagalog region, where
the sinakulo (Passion play)
and pabasa (readings)
have had a long history.
But the most vivid, if not
gory, depiction of Jesus’
suffering is the practice of
self-flagellation during the
Holy Week by those who
Fig. 1.3. Religious have made panata (vow). The penitents (almost always male) walk
procession, Samar Island:
suffering with Jesus. Photo
barefoot in procession with their faces veiled and lash their backs with
© Josephine A. Fernandez. rope or bamboo sticks until they bleed. In some places, others are
Used by permission.
commissioned to do the lashing.
Why do they inflict pain on themselves? With theologies of atone¬
ment in mind, it is easy to arrive at the conclusion that the penitents
do this as an act of penance for their own or others’ sin. Penance may
not be totally absent, but as Beltran’s study suggests, the penitents do
the self-flagellation primarily as a form of damay—sympathy with or
participation in Jesus’ suffering.23 For them self-flagellation is an act
of solidarity with the suffering Jesus.

PEOPLE'S THEOLOGY
Popular religiosity is the day-to-day religiosity that informs and
shapes the lives of people. If the Christian church neglects this real¬
ity, and if it is not integrated into the mainstream of the church’s life,
the people will continue to practice a split-level Christianity, one for
the sake of official Christianity and another for their everyday living.
Humility or knowing how to bow down to the religious intuitions
 Filipino Popular Christianity I Fernandez 49

of those who are not bred by the academy may be an expression of

wisdom. As Cebuano-speaking farmers say, “Ang humay nga may
unod moduko; ang tahupon motuhoy” (Like a stalk of rice, the more
it bows down or bends the more substance it contains; when it goes
straight up, it is actually empty [tahupon]). There is much that we
can learn from the common people’s religious intuitions that may
contribute to our understanding of the Christian notion of Christ’s
salvific incarnation.
If we venture into the world of the common people, we may
encounter a revelation—a widening of our own world. This reminds
me of a mundane revelatory encounter that happened in one of the
immersion trips to the Philippines I have led for students from the
United States. In the house of one of the fisherfolks, I noticed an
aquarium with very small fish, the size of a toothpick. I asked our
hosts what kind of fish they were. The fisherfolks
of Laguna de Bay (Philippines) told our group
The Importance of the Mass
that the fish in the wider lake (the siblings of the
The rituals in folk Catholicism often
fish in the aquarium) already weighed about two
function to validate and legitimate
pounds. There was a big difference in size between the existing cultural worldview and
the fish in the aquarium and those that were out values. The Mass, for example, is
in the lake. Then I turned to my students and commonly understood as a means to
explained the parable: just like the fish, if we stay get indulgences or favors for a dead
within our aquariums we will not grow; our world relative or friend. The person who
will remain small and narrow. But if we take the requests a Mass would often tell the

risk and venture into the wider world, we open priest that the deceased came to her

ourselves to the possibility of making our hearts or him in a dream. It does not matter

as large as the world.24 if the one requesting Mass for a dead

relative or friend is present during the
A story attributed to Juan Flavier, who used to
celebration. What is important is that
work as a rural physician, offers some insights.25
the Mass be done forthe benefit of the
In a conversation with a farmer in one of the
deceased person.
rural communities he served, Flavier quizzed the
—Benigno Beltran,
man about his ability to tell time. Flavier told the
The Christology of the Inarticulate:
farmer that he was ready to leave because it was An Inquiry into the Filipino
already five in the afternoon. The farmer looked Understanding of Jesus the Christ
around and told Flavier that it was not five in (Manila, Philippines:
the afternoon because the flower of the patola Divine Word, 1987), 137.
(gourd) did not fold yet. Wanting to test further
50 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

the farmer’s ability to tell time, the next day Flavier subjected the
farmer to the same question. But before he did it, he cut the flowers
of the patola. The farmer looked around in the direction of the patola,
but there were no more flowers to tell the time. Flavier thought that he
would outsmart the farmer this time, but then the farmer looked up at
a big acacia tree and told him that it was not yet five in the afternoon
because its leaves did not fold yet.
This story, I believe, gives us a glimpse of the hermeneutic attune-
ment of the common people to the world they inhabit. With new
eyes to see and ears to hear, we can discern that the peoples religious
intuition is very much attuned to their world and that the people’s
theological breathing and sensing are still one with the womb that has
given birth to them. Moreover, this story tells us how we must think
theologically with the people: we must be attuned to the world around
us, to its rhythm and its pulse, its folding and unfolding.

INTEGRAL SPIRITUALITY
As popular Christianity breaks the wall separating the sacred and
the secular, it also points to a way of seeing that the world of nature is
not outside of the purview of God but an embodiment of God or of
the spirits. The colonizers brought with them a foreign religion that
drove the spirits from nature, but another spirit came with them that
is more rapacious in character than the indigenous ones. As a child liv¬
ing in a rural area in Hinunangan, Southern Leyte, I was afraid of the
spirits that dwelt in the land, so I welcomed the new spirit that drove
them away. But eventually I realized that the new spirit that came to
our shores was more destructive; it was a spirit of destruction mas¬
querading as development. By contrast, in making all space the realm
of the spirit, popular religious intuition is pointing in the direction of
ecological sensibility.
Along with an understanding of the natural world as God’s embodi¬
ment calling for ecological sensibility, popular spirituality calls for a
spiritual practice that is not isolated in certain places and moments
considered sacred. With no financial means to buy a spirituality that
requires performance at a serene and comfortable meditation center,
 Filipino Popular Christianity I Fernandez

the ordinary people practice spirituality in the most banal of places

and times. They practice spirituality in the streets and agricultural
fields, in the mountains and on the ocean—wherever they spend most
of their time. Acutely aware that the forces of nature are beyond their
control, rural farmers consider their small field to be symbolic of their
faith. As Cebuano-speaking farmers say it, “Diha sa daruhan giladlad
namo ang among pagtuo” (In the vulnerable field we lay bare our faith
in God).26 They match this faith with the sweat of their labor, leaving
the final outcome to God (bahala na ang Dios—What will be will be
as God wishes). The final outcome belongs to God, but hard work is
not absent. “Ang pinakamahusay na pataba ay yapak ng magsasaka sa
lupa” says a Tagalog proverb (The best fertilizer is the footprints of
the farmer in the field). With the grain of rice or corn fertilized by the
sweat of the small farmers, it is not a surprise that a popular wisdom
saying has evolved: in Tagalog, “Ang bawat butil ngpalay ay pawis ng
magsasaka” (Every grain of rice is the sweat of the farmers). Hence,
each grain of rice must be truly valued.
In a similar manner, the small-time fisherfolks have developed
a spirituality that is consistent with their experience of life. Acutely
aware, like the farmers, that they do not have full control of the forces
of nature, they have learned to navigate life in the spirit of openness,
harmony, and a sense of right timing. If the field is symbolic of the
farmers’ faith, the ocean plays a similar role among the fisherfolks.
For them, the ocean is life; it sustains life. On the other hand its
fierce whimsy can be unforgiving. Its buoyant force makes one float;
but can also drown. Many have lost their lives in a storm. In spite of
the ocean’s unpredictability, the fisherfolks have continued to picture
God’s mercy with the imagery of the ocean because it has sustained
them: in Cebuano, “Ang kalooy sa Ginoo sama ka lapad sa dagat”
(God’s mercy is as wide as the ocean). When God’s ocean of mercy
blesses them with a safe return and a catch, they are usually met by
people on the shore—family members, friends, neighbors, as well as
buyers.
Whatever blessings the people receive become an occasion of reli¬
gious depth. An abundant harvest or catch leads to a fiesta celebration,
but even an ordinary meal is a sacrament. When there is little harvest
or catch, they still make it enough for the family. In a Filipino idiom
52 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

in Tagalog, “Kung maiksi ang kumot, matutong

The Role of Food mamaluktof (literal translation: If the blanket is
Kumain ka na ba? (Have you eaten short, one must know how to curl up). A fisher-
already?). This is one of the very first folk may prepare kinilaw (a raw seafood usually
questions that a person gets to hear mixed with spices, vinegar, and/or coconut milk)
when visiting afriend inthe Philippines. and invite friends in the neighborhood. Poor
This tells us of the centrality of food families make sure that every member is present
and intestines in Filipino religious and
during meal time and that everyone has an equal
social discourse. Close relationships
share. Maybe because they barely have enough to
among Filipinos are often described
get by, necessity has taught them that eating, more
in terms of intestinal connections.
than filling ones stomach, is a communal event.
The words kapatid (Tagalog), igsoon
One does not eat alone. Eating is an occasion for
(Cebuano), and bagis (llokano), which
mean sister or brother, have their roots
sharing not just food but life. Eating is a mark
in the word intestine bituka (Tagalog), of relationship, of connection. In fact, deep con¬
tinai (Cebuano), and bagis (Ilocano). nections among Filipinos are expressed through
This relational notion of intestinal con¬ the language of food and internal organs. The
nection is often applied in larger set¬ word kapatid (brother or sister), suggests Mela-
tings that are way beyond immediate nio Aoanan, is a contraction of “patid ng bituka”
kinship. (connected by a single intestine). Other Filipino
—Melanio Aoanan, "Toward languages, such as Cebuano (sumpay sa tinai) and
the Making of Filipino Intestinal
Ilocano (kapugsat iti bagis), speak of this intestinal
Theology," in Anumang Hiram
connection. Filipino theology, continues Aoanan,
Kung Hindi Masikip Ay Maluwang;
is truly an incarnational and, more specifically,
Iba't-lbang Anyo ng Teolohiyang
intestinal theology—a bituka (intestine) and pag-
Pumipiglas. Dasmarinas, Cavite,
kain (food) theology.27 Without romanticizing
Philippines: Union Theological
Seminary, 2006.
poverty, I say that it is ironic that those who have
more material goods in life eat alone more often
than those who have less. They may be eating
more nutritious food, but not necessarily a communally and spiritu¬
ally nourishing meal.

WHO IS JESUS?
The Jesus who suffers occupies a central place among the marginal¬
ized Filipinos because they see in Jesus’ plight their very own plight.
Again, penance for sins is not the main focus of popular Christology,
 Filipino Popular Christianity I Fernandez 53

but rather pakikiramay, or identification with the suffering of Jesus,

who in the first place embodied this quality. And closely associated
with pakikiramay (sympathy or maybe empathy) is malasakit (suffer¬
ing with). Following Beltrans point: “To make the truth of Jesus ones
own is to have damay and malasakit with him, to be his disciple and
share his destiny.”28
Pakikiramay and malasakit with Jesus, I believe, are fitting
responses of common Filipinos to Jesus because he embodied these
qualities in his very own life. They belong to the attributes of Jesus
that can be observed in his life, ministry, and death. Indeed, for the
suffering and struggling common people, Jesus was a person for oth¬
ers, a person who came of age. Even with all the risks involved, he
pursued Gods cause of bringing about the reign of God in the midst
of human destruction. Because Jesus’ love for the world was expressed
through his pakikiramay and malasakit with the disenfranchised, like
many Filipinos who have raised their prophetic voices, he raised the
ire of the power wielders and suffered a violent death. While bahala
na (What will be will be) seems to be associated with kapalaran, the
bahala na that is intertwined with the malasakit of Jesus forms into
a bahala na-malasakit, that is, taking the risks involved in struggling
with the disenfranchised of society.29
True, the image of the suffering and crucified Christ is prevalent
and is often interpreted through the lens of passive acceptance and
endurance of suffering, but a tradition of suffering as bahala na-
malasakit is equally present in Filipino popular Christianity. More¬
over, as embodied in the life of Jesus and in the tradition of the little
ones, there is not only a bahala na-malasakit but also a bahala na-sa
pakikibaka (taking risk for the people’s struggle). The Revolution of
1896 against the Spanish conquistadors and the People’s Power Revo¬
lution of 1986 that toppled the Marcos dictatorship ninety years later
both point to the tradition in which the love of the disenfranchised for
the crucified Christ is a liberating force.30 Reynaldo Iletos Pasyon and
Revolution points to the “Little Tradition” of the common people, in
contrast to the “Great Tradition” (nourished by the ilustrados [literally,
“enlightened ones”]—the elites during the Spanish colonial period),
as an animating force in the past and in the most recent struggles
of the Filipino people.31 No one could miss the pervasive symbol of
54 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

the crucified Christ in the past and most current

Mary, Mother of Jesus expressions of Peoples Power. Likewise, not to
Devotion to Mary—-the Immaculate be missed is the image of the Virgin Mary—the
Mother, occupies a central place in mother of Jesus, who was matimbang (one who
the lives of common Filipinos. This was really matters) for the common people.32
visibly true in the days of the famous While the resurrection tradition is not totally
People's Power Revolution (February absent in popular religious expressions, it is weak
22-25, 1986). The Immaculate Mother compared to the crucifixion tradition. We can cite
was a central figure in this so-called some reasons: People are already exhausted from
miraculous event. As the people
the Good Friday event, and the weather itself (hot
prayed with their rosaries and faced
summer) does not suggest the emergence of a new
the loyalist troops and tanks, the image
life from winter to spring, as in temperate coun¬
of the Blessed Virgin was with them.
tries. Nevertheless, if the Holy Week celebration
The triumph of the people's revolution
has the pasyon, the resurrection celebration has
was, for the common people, a victory
or triumph of Mary. the salubong. Salubong is the reenactment of the
—Teodoro Bacani, Mary and the dawn meeting of Jesus and his mother, in which
Filipino (Makati, Philippines: the statues of the Risen Christ and the Sorrowful
St. Paul, 1985), 67-69. Mother are unveiled by a girl in the attire of an
angel, singing the Regina Coeli. Then the removal
of the veil during the meeting is accompanied by
the release of doves and bati, a dance of joyful celebration.33 Where
the forces of death continue to reign, the salubong celebration is a
source of inspiration, vision, and hope. It is founded on the belief that,
like Jesus, the Filipino people will someday have their own resurrec¬
tion. The salubong points to the dawn that ushers in the new day for
the suffering people. Or in the idiom of the people, in Tagalog, “Ang
araw bago sumikat nakikita muna’y banaag ’ (Early dawn precedes the
sunrise).

HOPE FOR THE FUTURE

The resurrection tradition is a living tradition of the common Filipino
people. The common people’s desperate situation and the Christian
tradition have given birth to the salubong. Any faithful interpretation
of the common people’s resurrection tradition must be rooted in the
people’s desperate situation. It is out of the banality of crucifixions
that the common people speak of resurrection. The notion of a grand
 Filipino Popular Christianity Fernandez 55

Filipino Folk Sayings

Ganyan talaga yan. It is really like that, or That is what reality is.
Bahala na. What will be, will be.
Wala itugotsa kahitas-an. The all-powerful God did not grant it.
Dili pa iyang panahon. Its time has not yet come.
Na sa Dios ang awa, na sa tao ang gawa. Mercy comes from God, but
labor belongs to humans.
Bahala na ang Dios. What will be will be as God wishes.
Ubos-ubos biyaya, pagkatapos nakatunganga. Spend lavishly, and you
end up with nothing. Or, more literally, Spend all your blessings, and
you end up not only with nothing but not knowing what to do.
Madaling maging tao, ngunit marihap magpakatao. It is easy to be a man/
woman, but difficult to make oneself human.
Ang humay nga may unod moduko; ang tahupon motuhoy. A stalk of rice
with substance bows down; an empty one goes straight up. Or, Like a
stalk of rice, the more it bows down or bends the more substance it
contains; when it goes straight up, it is actually empty.
Ang pinakamahusay na pataba ay yapak ng magsasaka sa lupa. The best
fertilizer is the footprints of the farmer in the field.
Ang bawat butil ng palay ay pawis ng magsasaka. Every grain of rice is
the sweat of the farmers.
An kalooy sa Ginoo sama ka lapad sa dagat. God's mercy is as wide as
the ocean.
Kung maiksi ang kumot, matutong mamaluktot. If the blanket is short, one
must know how to curl up.
Ang araw bago sumikat nakikita muna'y banaag. Early dawn precedes the
sunrise.
Patay na, pinapatay pa! Already dead, but killed again!
Ang hindi marunong lumingon sa pinanggalingan ay hindi makararating sa
paruruonan. One who does not know how to look back to one's past
will not reach one's destination.
Daghan pa ang mangingisda kaysa isda. There are more fisherfolks than
fish.
Kung walang tiyaga, walang nilaga. If you do not persevere, you cannot
expect something.

resurrection somewhere and someday may not be totally absent in the

peoples common discourse, understood either as hope or as escape,
but this grand resurrection makes sense only when we reinterpret
56 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

resurrection as what happens to people on the other side of the vari¬

ous kinds of deaths in the here and now.
Wherever we turn, the crucifixion and death of the common Fili¬
pinos is happening all the time and in all places. Theirs is a history of
dreams betrayed and hopes dashed. While they continue to suffer from
natural calamities, death caused by storm is infrequent among fisher-
folks, death from shark attacks is also rare. The sharks that are killing
more fisherfolks do not live in the sea but on land—the “loan sharks.”
Likewise, in the day-to-day Filipino discourse the killer crocodiles or
alligators (buayas) do not live in the rivers but in public places. They
devour the government coffers, and some varieties of these buayas col¬
lect money, or what is popularly called tong, from the meager income
of the jeepney drivers. As if this situation is not already a death sen¬
tence, there are cases when even the dead are killed twice. Some seek
donations for a dead person and then
run away with the money afterward.
As they say, “Patay na, pinapatay pa!”
(Already dead, but killed again!).
Resurrection in the midst of the
various kinds of deaths may be hard
to find in the lives of the people and
those who are dying before their time,
but they are not totally absent. They are
present in the midst of death—present
even in the cemetery. This is true in the
life of Aling Panchang. She has lived in
Fig. 1.4. Smokey Mountain 2, Manilas North Cemetery since 1955. Some time in 1960 she moved in
Manila. Photo © Eleazar S.
Fernandez. Used by
with her son, who had acquired a small piece of land and a house at a
permission. relocation site. But the situation in the relocation site was so desper¬
ate that, in the words of Aling Panchang, “I couldn’t stand it anymore.
You know squatter areas are terrible! So much noise and so crowded.
I came back to the cemetery after a month—and have not left since.
I think I might stay here—forever.”34 Living in the cemetery where
there was peace was, for Aling Panchang, a resurrection experience.
Indeed, it is hard to find grand moments of resurrection. For
those who are barely making it in life, like Aling Panchang, survival is
already a foretaste of resurrection. It is from this most banal experi-
 Filipino Popular Christianity I Fernandez 57

ence of resurrection that the common

people are making connections with
the resurrection of Jesus. With Jesus’
resurrection embodying their very own
resurrection, the common people have
started to read their history with new
eyes, seeing it as a history of survival,
struggle, and not giving up whatever lit¬
tle ray of hope is present. With this lens
of reading history, the struggling com¬
mon people have liberated the past from
being a prison house. They engage in the
retrieval of the past because they know that it is necessary for the jour¬ Fig. 1.5. The cemetery has
ney toward a new and better tomorrow. Or as a Filipino saying puts been a home to many urban
poor Filipinos. Photo ©
it (in Tagalog), “Ang Hindi marunong lumingon sa pinanggalingan ay Josephine A. Fernandez.
Used by permission.
Hindi makararating sa paruruonan’ (One who does not know how to
look back to ones past will not reach one’s destination). Looking back
to one’s past is a way of forging a new tomorrow through dedication to
the present in acts of transformation. Here kasaysayan (history) is not
only an alaala (memory) but also a pangako (promise).35
What is this pangako? For the fisherfolks, it is not about the apoca¬
lyptic vision of sea or ocean disappearing (Rev. 21:1). That would not
be a pangako, but a bangungot (nightmare) for those whose daily life
depends on the ocean. An encounter with fisherfolks in Laguna de
Bay points to this nightmarish possibility already slowly becoming a
reality. One evening, in the hut where our immersion group rested for
the night, one of the fisherfolks shared his fears tearfully as he thought
about the death of the lake, a source of his livelihood and the future
of his children, as a result of pollution coming from nearby factories.
With a deep sigh he asked: “How will I support my children, and what
will happen to them?”
The plight of the fisherfolks in Laguna de Bay is shared by fisher¬
folks in the Visayas and Mindanao. The destruction of coral reefs by
illegal fishing and the death of mangroves have adversely affected the
ocean’s ability to support the lives of the small fisherfolks and their
families. One has to go far to the open sea to get more catch. As fish¬
erfolks in the Visayas and Mindanao say, uDaghan pa ang mangingisda
58 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

kay sa isda” (There are more fisherfolks than fish). In Pasil (Cebu
City), for example, a different form of mananagat (literally, one whose
livelihood is associated with the ocean) has evolved. When I heard the
word mananagat, I immediately associated it with fishing, as people
commonly do. So my question to the wife of a mananagat was, “What
kind of fish does your husband usually get?” Her answer surprised me:
“My husband fishes or dives for scraps of iron or steel that fall into
the ocean floor somewhere near the pier. Whatever catch he gets, he
sells them by the kilo to the buyers.” What a frightening image of the
future: the ocean is not breeding fish but iron refuse as a result of the
markets relentless pursuit of profits.
A more appropriate image of pangako for the lowly ones is that of
a banquet—a popular image of Jesus’ eschatological vision. For those
who have barely enough to survive, like those who depend on galong-
gong (round scad—a kind of fish more affordable to the common
people), daing (dried fish), and bagoong (salted fish) for food, what
could be the best expression of the pangako if not a banquet—a fiesta?
The fiesta is characterized by an abundance of food—lechon (whole
roasted pig), embotido, hamonado, relyenong bangus, pancit, calderita,
and various kinds of desserts—and by joy, friendship, and sharing. In
God’s eschatological fiesta everyone has access to that which sustains
life; it is an egalitarian meal.
Birthing the pangako is surely not an easy venture. The common
Filipinos know that it requires a transformation of loob (core or cen¬
ter), a very important concept among Filipinos. They recognize that
hardness of heart (katigasan ng loob), more than dullness of thought,
is the greatest obstacle to transformation, which requires pagba-
balik loob (repentance). For the lowly ones with diminished agency,
transformation means the empowerment of loob so that they may
develop lakas ng loob (courage). The development of lakas ng loob can,
however, come only through a long gradual work of empowerment.
While human effort is crucial, the common Filipinos believe that the
transformation of loob is a kaloob ng Dios (gift of God) who has the
attribute of kagandahang loob (compassion, willing the well-being of
the people), says Beltran.36
Birthing the pangako (promise) requires patience, perseverance,
and staying awake, qualities that are abundant in supply among those
 Filipino Popular Christianity I Fernandez 59

who have been seasoned by suffering and struggle. In the words of the
common people: (in Tagalog) “Kung walang tiyaga, walang nilaga”
(If you do not persevere, you cannot expect something). Small farm¬
ers know what patience and staying awake mean when they have to
stay awake all night long to irrigate their rice field during hot summer
months or when there is drought. Jeepney drivers know what patience
and staying awake mean as they wait and find openings through the
heavy traffic of urban centers in order to get to their destination. And
fisherfolks know how to wait for the habagat (southwest wind) or the
amihan (northeast wind) to subside or stop before proceeding to the
ocean. They know that when timog comes (south wind), it is a sign that
the typhoon is on its way out. The typhoon has been blowing for a long
time, blowing away the peoples dreams. The people are actively waiting
for the opportune moment when they can synchronize their efforts with
the power of timog, which can be interpreted as Spirit (good wind).
Moreover, birthing the pangako—a new and better tomorrow—
requires faithful companions along the way. As the root of the word
“companion” (Latin: cum panis) suggests, it means sharing the life-
nourishing tinapay (bread) or baon (meal prepared for the journey).
The common people are aware that their dreamed-for new tomor¬
row can only come through the help of companions. They know the
essence of communal endeavor through the bayanihan spirit (spirit of
helping one another). Though this spirit is under assault, it is still alive
in many areas, particularly in rural communities.
When we open ourselves to the lives of the common people, a
revelation may happen. And there is no revelation without trans¬
formation. When we allow ourselves to be guests of the disenfran¬
chised—taking popular religious history seriously—we open ourselves
to the possibility of being transformed by the insights of those whose
wisdom this world often despises.

FOR FURTHER READING

Alejo, Albert. Tao Po! Tuloy! Isang Landas ng Pag-unawa sa Loob ng Tao. Quezon City,
Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University, 1991.
Andres, Tomas, and Pilar Ilada-Andres, Understanding the Filipino. Quezon City, Phil¬
ippines: New Day, 1987.
60 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

Bacani, Teodoro. Mary and the Filipino. Makati, Philippines: St. Paul, 1985.
Beltran, Benigno. The Christology of the Inarticulate: An Inquiry into the Filipino Under¬
standing of Jesus the Christ. Manila, Philippines: Divine Word, 1987.
De Mesa, Jose. In Solidarity with the Culture: Studies in Theological Re-rooting. Maryhill
Studies 4. Quezon City, Philippines: Maryhill School of Theology, 1987.
Fernandez, Eleazar S. Toward a Theology of Struggle. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books,
1994.
Ileto, Reynaldo. Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840-
1910. Quezon City, Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University, 1979.
Jocano, Landa F. Folk Christianity: A Preliminary Study of Conversion and Patterning
of Christian Experience in the Philippines, Monograph Series No. 1. Quezon City,
Philippines: Trinity Research Institute, 1981.
Mercado, Leonardo. Inculturation in Filipino Theology. Manila, Philippines: Divine
Word, 1992.
Velunta, Revelation, ed. AnumangHiram Kung Hindi Masikip Ay Maluwang: Iba’t-Ibang
Anyo ng Teolohiyang Pumipiglas. Dasmarinas, Cavite, Philippines: Union Theo¬
logical Seminary, 2006.
RURAL SOUTHERN BLACK WOMEN
IN THE UNITED STATES

ROSETTA E JOSS
CHAPTER TWO

R ecalling her youth as a tenant on a South Carolina farm, Victoria

Way DeLee (b. 1925) once said, “Well, really, back then, we were
treated like slaves. ’Cause when the white people said you had to go
to work, you had to, whether you wanted to or not.”1 Though DeLee’s
experience was not indicative of that of all early twentieth-century
southern rural African Americans, it was symbolic of a large number,
especially those whose lives were marked by sharecropping and ten¬
ancy. Fannie Lou Townsend Hamer’s (1917-1977) early experience of
sharecropping was similar to DeLee’s. So were her recollections about
race: “I really didn’t know what everything was about but I couldn’t
understand why Black people worked so hard and never had nothing.
I just couldn’t understand why the white people that weren’t working
were always riding in nice cars, two or three cars and a truck. I just
couldn’t understand why they had everything, and it seemed that we
worked all the time and didn’t have nothing.”2
Although agribusiness predominates in the early twenty-first
century, during the first half of the twentieth century many people in
the United States lived in rural areas and interacted with family farms.
DeLee’s and Hamer’s comments reflect the situation of many African
Americans in relation to those farms. In the southern United States,
most family farms were vestiges of nineteenth-century southern plan¬
tations. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century southern colonial econo¬
mies thrived off profits derived chiefly from enslaved agricultural
labor. During the heyday of the colonial era, plantation profits made

61
62 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

the South one of the wealthiest regions of the United States. By the
time DeLee and Hamer were born, the elite splendor of the southern
colonial economy was gone. Nevertheless, large family farms of the
early through mid-twentieth century maintained relatively unbroken
economic, social, and political connections to the plantation system
of the colonial period. Civil rights activism by people like DeLee and
Hamer challenged and helped interrupt twentieth-century continuity
of colonial views and practices in the South. Cheap African American
labor was the main engine driving the southern farm economy in the
early twentieth century.
Two mechanisms of control preserved the status of early twen¬
tieth-century black labor: white supremacist cultural practices and
the Jim Crow political codes they were coupled with. Violence and
humiliation were interrelated cultural practices that aimed to main¬
tain the colonial subordination and cheap labor costs instituted
during the antebellum era. The combination of violence and humili¬
ation—evident, for example, in verbal mockery during lynching
and rape—emerged after Emancipation
to mitigate potential gains of African
Americans during the brief Recon¬
struction period. Implying that black
persons did not deserve better treatment
or fair compensation, racial humilia¬
tion sought to undermine the evolving
identity of formerly enslaved persons
as subjects and citizens. Racial violence
combined with humiliation as a physical
means of subduing self-conscious black
agency.
When Reconstruction ended, sub¬
jugating cultural practices became more
intense and were formally supplemented
by Jim Crow legal codes that subordi¬
nated black persons politically. Born in
Fig. 2.!. Victoria Way the first three decades of the twentieth century, persons like DeLee
DeLee, c. 1971. Photo
is courtesy The State and Hamer spent their childhood and early adult lives enduring
newspaper of Columbia, these practices and negotiating the shared evangelical Christian reli-
South Carolina. Used by
permission.
 Rural Southern Black Women in the United States Ross 63

gious culture that both supported and opposed

racial subordination. Once they engaged the civil
rights movement, DeLee and Hamer, like other
civil rights advocates, took on an interpreta¬
tion of Christianity that challenged racism and
made way for their development as important
civil rights leaders and organizers. This chapter
examines how DeLees and Hamers experiences
in the Jim Crow South reflected the movement
of rural black southern women from peonage to
citizen leaders. Racial humiliation, violence, and
restrictive political codes colored DeLee’s and
Hamer’s experiences as low-wage farm laborers.
As children, both engaged the southern evan¬
gelical Christian culture. As the civil rights move¬
ment entered their local areas, DeLee and Hamer
combined tenacity, indigenous moral analysis,
southern evangelical religious views, and liberal
constructions of Christianity they encountered in civil rights activism. Fig. 2.2. Fannie Lou Hamer at
The combination helped DeLee, Hamer, and thousands of their con- ^Atlan t ic^City ^ew^'
temporaries participate in bringing forth a new era of U.S. history. Jersey, August 1964. Photo by
Warren K. Leffler, courtesy of
the Library of Congress.

AGRICULTURAL ECONOMY IN THE SOUTH

One of the most striking signs of the connection between nineteenth-
and twentieth-century southern economies was the situation of Afri¬
can Americans and their labor in relation to the agricultural economy.
During the early twentieth century an overwhelming majority of rural
southern African Americans were part of the farm industry. African
Americans interacted with the southern agricultural economy in three
primary ways: as owners of small to moderate-size family farms, as
sharecroppers, and as tenant-laborers (with the latter category includ¬
ing both field workers and household service workers). The major¬
ity were sharecroppers and tenants,3 living the difficult, exploitative
relationship that traded work for shares of crops, lodging, and, some¬
times, meager wages.
64 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

Based in economic practices that sought to

Injustice and Self-Reliance keep labor costs as close as possible to enslaved
Black people who were living in the free labor, sharecropping and tenancy systems
South were constantly living with vio¬ were difficult for African Americans because the
lence. Part of the job was to help them exchange of shoddy residences, paltry supplies,
to understand what that violence was and meager income prevented most persons
and how they in an organized fash¬ from realizing profitable benefits of their labor.
ion could help to stem it. The major
Well-known southern farm economy activities
job was getting people to understand
reduced labor costs by extending sharecroppers’
that they had something within their
credit for seed, fertilizer, and other supplies
power that they could use, and it
(generally at an exorbitant markup) at the farms
could only be used if they understood
supply store. Other means of reducing labor
what was happening and how group
action could counter violence even
costs were cheating workers by using loaded
when it was perpetuated by the police counterweights to determine payment for pick¬
or, in some instances, the state. My ing cotton, paying tenant workers through
basic sense of it has always been to (sometimes used) goods or with vouchers for
get people to understand that in the merchandise, and extending credit for everyday
long run they themselves are the only goods. Young Victoria Way lamented low wages
protection they have against violence and payment through used goods, and as an
or injustice.... People have to be adult Victoria DeLee recalled wondering why
made to understand that they cannot
her grandmother had to “work for 25 cents a
look for salvation anywhere but to
day. Why we had to go out there and bring a bag
themselves.
of those white people old clothes and stuff home
—Ella Josephine Baker, from Gerda
and things like that.”4 Hamer—whose position
Lerner, ed., Black Women in White
as plantation timekeeper gave her some mea¬
America: A Documentary History
(New York: Vintage, 1972), 347.
sure of authority—reported her resistance to
defrauding practices by using her own counter¬
weight whenever possible.5
At the end of the farming season, sharecroppers and tenants were
often more heavily indebted to farm stores than their crop earnings
or wages could cover. For many persons, this debt was perpetual.
The ordinary resolution of this obligation was through the promise
of labor to the farm for the following season. In what have become
known as “Deep South” states, such as Mississippi and South Caro¬
lina, these labor practices were rampant. Some families were able to
turn a profit and managed to escape the grip of the system. Others’
hopes were dashed through cruelty such as destroying crops or killing
 Rural Southern Black Women in the United States | Ross 65

farm animals. Hamer Fig. 2.3. Ella Baker

recalled, for example, speaking at the
Democratic Conven¬
the one year her father tion, Atlantic City, New
planned “to rent some Jersey, August 10,1964.
Photo © 1976 George
land, because it was Ballis/Take Stock.
always better if you
rent the land.” That
season Mr. Townsend
“did get enough money
to buy... mules, wag¬
ons, cultivators and some farming equipment,” but someone “killed
the mules and our cows. That knocked us right back down.”6

LIVING WITH VIOLENCE AND HUMILIATION

In the early twentieth century many African Americans had no viable
alternative to staying within the southern agricultural economy. Less
than two generations past enslavement, the majority were descended
from persons who had no resources to bequeath as generational assets.
Moreover, social, cultural, and political structures compelled African
Americans’ conformity and helped secure their status as cheap labor
for the southern farm economy. In addition to economic structures that
kept African Americans tied to southern farms, violence and humilia¬
tion were para-economic mechanisms of subjugation and control.
Both DeLee and Hamer were familiar with indignities and vio¬
lence that accompanied and supported southern agriculture. Brutal
treatment of black womens bodies in the South and across the United
States is well documented from the era of enslavement forward.7
Presumptuous familiarity, especially in regard to touching and the
manner of addressing black women, and the physical brutality of rape,
often accompanied by coarse patriarchal verbal abuse, were forms of
violence and humiliation aimed directly at black women. Disregard
for African American parental authority and various forms of depri¬
vation also may have taken on particularly gendered dimensions. Vic¬
toria DeLee described the personal experience of being struck in the
head while her grandmother stood by because she disputed a white
66 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

farmer’s assessment of the way she picked cotton. The humiliating

violence of being physically assaulted by the white landowner in her
grandmother’s presence was compounded by Victoria’s being beaten
by her grandmother, who, DeLee said, “just had to just beat me, ’cause
she know if not he could, would have killed me.”8
In addition to forms of violence and indignity targeting women,
there also was, of course, the practice of lynching. Documented statis¬
tics on the number of African Americans killed through mob violence
in the early twentieth century suggest that “on the average, a black
man, woman, or child was murdered nearly once a week, every week,
between 1882 and 1930 by a hate-driven white mob.”9 As a social and
cultural instrument that supplemented political and economic prac¬
tices to keep sharecropping and tenancy in place, lynching served not
merely as “punishment.” Booming in the early twentieth century (after
Reconstruction and federal protections for African Americans were
withdrawn from the South) lynching was a mechanism of terror used
primarily to supplement other means of coercing African American
subjugation. As they were inducted into the farm labor system, male
and female children were introduced to the threat of mob violence
and lynching.
DeLee’s and Hamer’s early knowledge of lynch mobs is evident
through the vivid specificity with which they related lynching stories
from their communities. Hamer recalled the report of Joe Pulliam, a
black sharecropper who objected to, Hamer said, being “robbed ... of
what he earned.” Initially wounded by gunfire for his objection, Pul¬
liam lost his life when he defended himself. Hamer related details of
Joe Pulliam being dragged by his heels on the back of a car through
town and the severing of Pulliam’s ears for display as a warning to oth¬
ers who might object.10
DeLee recounted particulars of a Mr. Fogle being castrated, hav¬
ing his organs stuffed in his mouth, then being hung and shot to
death “piece by piece.”11 DeLee’s account included both learning of
the violence and experiencing humiliation and intimidation when
Bub Cummings, the white farmer who reported the story, recounted
details of the incident to intimidate her grandmother. Lucretia Way’s
being addressed with the familiar “Mom Cretia,” use of the racial slur
“niggers,” and the threat that failure to comply could result in similar
 Rural Southern Black Women in the United States Ross 67

treatment all accompanied Cummings’s story,

which DeLee overheard. Furthermore, DeLee The Bodies
identified Cummings as intentionally including During the time they were looking
her as a child in the intimidation: “Here this for the bodies of Chaney, Schwerner,
man being killed, and I overheard. He didn’t and Goodman, they found other bod¬
care. He talked right in front of us.”12 Practices ies throughout the state. They found
of sociocultural racial violence persisted well torsos in the Mississippi River, they

into the civil rights era. Murders of student found people who were buried, they

workers Michael Schwerner, Andrew Good¬ even found a few bodies of people on
the side of roads.
man, and James Chaney, NAACP leaders like
—David Dennis, quoted in Our
Medgar Evers, volunteers such as Viola Luizzo,
Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in
as well as beatings and mob attacks on protest¬
America, Kristian Williams
ers are a few examples of the violent intimida¬
(Brooklyn, N.Y.: Soft Skull, 2004), 110.
tion aimed at curtailing civil rights activism.
Childhood familiarity with sociocultural
racial violence and participation in sharecropper and tenant indebt¬
edness did not mean this situation was acceptable. Both DeLee and
Hamer assert that as children they analyzed and protested injustice
of African Americans’ situation. DeLee’s analysis yielded significant
theological, social, and moral indignation. She protested her lack of
control of her labor by compromising the quality of her work or by dis¬
obeying instructions. In response to being disciplined for her actions,
DeLee verbally communicated disagreement with the morality of her
grandmother’s punishing her for such actions.13 As a girl Hamer said
she questioned the justice and value of hard work. “‘Sometimes I be
working in the fields and I get so tired I’d say to the people picking
cotton with me, hard as we have to work for nothing, there must be
some way we can change this.’”14 The transgenerational nature of their
experience as women particularly affected DeLee and Hamer. Both
expressed anger, pain, and regret at their grandmother and mother,
respectively, having such hard lives. As a child DeLee asked why
“[God] let the people do what they was doing to her [grandmother]?
Why she had to work so hard?... I was sayin, ‘Don’t you worry, I’ll
fix it for my grandmomma.”15 Similarly Hamer wondered, “why did it
have to be so hard for [my mother]. ... I vowed that when I got big¬
ger, I’d do better by her. ... If I lived to get grown and had a chance,
I was going to try to get something for my mother and I was going
68 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

to do something for the Black man

of the south if it would cost my life;
I was determined to see that things
were changed.”16 As girls, neither had
means nor access to effect change;
however, both DeLee and Hamer
resolved that things should change
and, reflecting a normal familial sen¬
timent, both wanted the changes for
their parents. Both women carried
this resolve into their adult lives.
In addition to their familiar¬
ity with racial violence as children,
both DeLee and Hamer experienced
violent practices of the civil rights
era. During portions of their most
active periods, repressive and retalia¬
tory violence was common. DeLee
once described a wall of her home
as “like a polka dot dress where the
bullet holes from where they would
shoot in the house.” During the same
period her home was destroyed by
arson.17 DeLee and her husband,
Fig. 2.4. Fannie Lou Hamer S. B., rotated sleeping at night to watch for terrorists who attacked civil
marching at a voter registra- . , . , ,, , T . , . ,
tion demonstration, Hatties- rights workers homes after dark. In one instance during school deseg-
burg, Mississippi, January regation battles, a mob attacked DeLee and other African Americans
Matt Herron/Take Stock. who attended a high school basketball game. Harassed and beaten
because of her activism, Hamer also experienced having shots fired
into her home. This occurred shortly after her first voter registration
attempt when she moved in with a friend. As her activism continued,
Hamer said that the repeated violence “made us look like criminals.
We would have to have our lights out before dark.”18 In one now infa¬
mous encounter, Hamer was brutally beaten while being held in a jail
cell following her arrest with others in Winona, Mississippi. Returning
from a civil rights training meeting, the group was arrested because
they entered the “whites only” waiting room.19 The severity of that
beating has been said to have hastened Hamers death.
 Rural Southern Black Women in the United States I Ross 69

POLITICAL SUPPORTS FOR WHITE SUPREMACY

Limiting public education and denying civil enfranchisement were
formal political mechanisms used to help subjugate black persons
during the early twentieth century. Most rural black family life was
shaped by the farm economy. American colonial perspectives about
African Americans included narrow views about black children as
well as adults. The colonial idea that African American children and
youth were only potential field hands and servants remained in the
imagination of many southern whites well into the twentieth century.
In regard to education, formal political support of the lingering south¬
ern agricultural economy meant seasons for planting and harvesting
determined African American school terms. Because planting began
in early spring and harvesting continued through late fall, the school
year for black children was only four months (generally November
through February). While the shortened school period meant older
children, youth, and adults spent planting and harvesting seasons
in fields, infants and very young children who could not work spent
days near the fields. Very young children generally were cared for by a
slightly older child who was too young to work or whose work assign¬
ment was caring for the younger children.
Accompanying the shortened school term in limiting possibilities
for rural black youth was the early age at which some children entered
the labor market. Like their male counterparts, southern rural African
American girls usually entered the farm economy as field laborers
(and a smaller number as house servants). Fannie Lou Hamer recalled
first taking on tenant indebtedness at the age children ordinarily
entered school. “I started working when I was 6 years old,” Hamer
said. Distracted from play one day by the owner of the plantation
where her family resided, Hamer agreed that she would pick thirty
pounds of cotton when the farmer “called off the different kinds of
things like Cracker jack and cake he would give me” if she were able
to do so. The treats were things, Hamer said, “Id never had ... in my
life.” She immediately took on responsibility for the work she would
engage in for the next three and a half decades, as her parents clarified
their own impoverished situation that could not afford such treats:
“They told me that I would have to pick that 30 lbs. of cotton myself,
they wouldn’t give it to me,” Hamer remembered. While her parents
70 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

were likely quite aware that their daughter would

On Registering to Vote be indebted, the six-year-old girl was not. As
I applied for voter registration six times Hamer found out, she became trapped in debt to
before I was able to be accepted. I the farmer, and, she later recalled, “I never did get
was only able to be accepted after out of his debt again.”20
we had taken our registrar to court. In Civil disenfranchisement was another politi¬
fact, all of my applications were used cal mechanism for controlling African American
by the Justice Department in trying to labor. Although the thirteenth and fifteenth U.S.
have the registrar establish why I had
constitutional amendments abolished enslave¬
not been registered in the beginning.
ment (1865) and granted black men the right to
—Victoria Gray, from Henry Hampton
vote (1870), these constitutional changes were
and Steven Fayer, eds., Voices of
not secure. Postwar efforts to “reconstruct” social
Freedom: Art Oral History of the Civil
and political space for African Americans almost
Rights Movement from the 1950s
through the 1980s (New York: Bantam, always were piecemeal and depended largely on
1991), 180. the presence of federal troops for enforcement.
The Tilden-Hayes compromise settling the 1876
election initiated withdrawal of federal troops
from southern states.21 Once the troops left, Jim Crow regression
emerged. Alongside violence, southern state legislatures enacted a
series of barriers to black male enfranchisement. The 1890 South
Carolina state legislature, for example, abolished election of local gov¬
ernment officials in favor of appointments, and required a poll tax, a
literacy test, and property ownership for voting. In addition, the state
legislature sought to strip African American men of the franchise
labeling “offenses ... blacks were thought especially prone to commit”
as “disenfranchising offenses.”22 Southern black women fared no bet¬
ter after passage of the Nineteenth amendment (1920) enfranchising
women.

COMING OF AGE
One of the most dramatic changes brought by the civil rights move¬
ment was its disruption of social and economic connections of black
labor to the southern farm economy. The resolve of rural blacks
played no small role in causing this change. Women like DeLee of
South Carolina and Hamer of Mississippi lived the southern legacy of
 Rural Southern Black Women in the United States Ross 71

the colonial era and ushered the civil rights movement into the rural
South. Their civil rights activities helped sever the yoke linking the
majority of southern African American labor to the southern agricul¬
tural economy The civil rights movement altered what it meant for
persons like DeLee and Hamer to fully come of age: it created a whole
new meaning of entering adulthood for generations of black women.
During the early twentieth century coming of age for African
American young women in the rural South included pragmatically
enduring realities of continued poverty and farm work as part and
parcel of considerations like marriage and family. Hamer’s descrip¬
tion of her early adult life reflects this: “My life has been almost like
my mothers was, because I married a man who sharecropped.” Fan¬
nie Lou Townsend met Perry Hamer in the cotton fields of Sunflower
County, Mississippi. After they developed a friendship, when Fannie
Lou Townsend was about twenty-four, the two married. Perry Hamer,
a tractor driver for the W. D. Marlowe plantation, took his new wife
to live with him; in addition to serving as a fieldhand, Mrs. Hamer
was plantation timekeeper and performed housework (as did her
mother) to supplement her family’s income.23 They did not have their
own biological children, but the couple, while in poverty, adopted two
children within the community whose families were unable to provide
for them.
DeLee, who was seven years younger than Hamer, did not spend
as much of her early adult life as a tenant. But she was as practical as
Hamer and others of their generation in regard to the possibilities for
her future. Frustrated by the way white supremacy circumscribed her
life and wanting to overcome limits imposed by her stern, protective
grandmother, DeLee decided getting married would give her freedom
to “get what I wanted done.” At age fifteen Victoria Way eloped with
her suitor, S. B. DeLee, whom she met at church.24 The DeLees had six
children of their own and adopted two others. S. B. DeLee’s employ¬
ment with a federal agency outside his county of residence prevented
the necessity of Victoria DeLee’s continuing work as a tenant and
provided economic security that insulated the family from financial
repercussions of her civil rights activism. Still, DeLee had ongoing
experience of sharecropping and tenancy, since her grandmother,
mother, and siblings remained in the system.
72 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

EVANGELICALS, JIM CROW, AND CIVIL RIGHTS

Practice of evangelical Christianity existed alongside and sometimes
in support of the southern farm economy. Protestant evangelical¬
ism was the religious tradition adhered to by most black and white
southerners. Peter Paris and Latta Thomas25 have noted that in most
points of theology and doctrine African American Christian denomi¬
nations acceded to the perspectives of the traditions from which they
emerged. Scholars of U.S. religious history generally argue that black
persons in North America took up Christianity as a consequence of
at least three things: the disruption of enslaved Africans’ sociocultural
world, the plantation practice of imposing Christianity to indoctri¬
nate docility, and the prohibition on practicing African traditional
religions in the South.
Although they shared the same religious tradition, in general
black and white southerners drew vastly different moral conclusions
about the meaning of that religion for social and political life. On the
one hand, many white laypeople and clergy argued that Christianity
supported racial segregation and racial hierarchy. Riggins Earl and
Eugene Genovese note that some clergy developed complex treatises
arguing for this.26 Moreover, as Charles Marsh points out, during the
civil rights era Ku Klux Klan leaders used Christianity to substanti¬
ate their opposition to the movement.27 On the other hand, African
Americans connected their opposition to segregation and subordi¬
nation with their understanding of Christianity. Although African
Americans began to practice Christianity during the period of their
enslavement and often encountered interpretations of Christianity
that encouraged their compliance, as the religion developed among
them, it was distinct from the prevailing southern white interpreta¬
tions in at least one feature: African Americans held the widespread
view that racial subordination and white supremacy were incompat¬
ible with Christianity.
It cannot be argued that to a person every African American
arrived at the same moral conclusion about the social and political
meaning of Christianity. Some did not disagree with their enslave¬
ment, and some blacks were themselves enslavers. Nor can it be
ignored that some southern white Christians opposed enslavement
and segregation. Nevertheless, the reigning tendency among the two
 Rural Southern Black Women in the United States Ross 73

groups in regard to the meaning of being Christian rests on this dis¬

parity about practical moral implications of the religion. The discrep¬
ancy proved to be the basis of what Vincent Harding has called “the
river” of black resistance to bondage as well as the source of black and
white abolitionist sentiments. It also was the origin of the civil rights
movement activities in which Hamer and DeLee became involved.
Opponents of enslavement and racial subordination depended
on shared aspects of the evangelical Christian religious culture to
support their efforts for change. Although moral conclusions drawn
by black and white southerners generally differed in regard to reli¬
gion’s implications for sociopolitical life, it was at least in part moral
suasion based on religious ideas that accompanied the rhetoric of
abolitionists and civil rights advocates as they aimed their arguments
at white Christians. The location of South Carolina and Mississippi
in the country’s Bible belt meant evangelical Christianity held strong
cultural significance in the rearing and identities of DeLee and
Hamer. Like the majority of people across the South, from childhood
on, both engaged Christianity as part of the ascribed cultural belief
system.
DeLee and Hamer recall early religious inculcation that included
prayers by women in their family. DeLee also remembered her ques¬
tions about the utility of theological faith and prayer. She said her
grandmother Lucretia Way believed in and prayed for divine inter¬
vention to change her circumstances, to “fix it.” But young Victoria
wondered, “What kind of God [would] let people do what they was
doing to her [grandmother]?” At that point, DeLee said, she doubted
the existence of any divinity.28 DeLee’s disbelief as a child broached
the issue of theodicy. Taken up among some black theologians shaped
by the civil rights era, theodicy emerges from the reality of centuries of
black suffering in North America and remains an issue among theistic
believers in the African diaspora. As a child DeLee challenged and
debated her grandmother’s God, ultimately declaring to that divinity,
“Don’t you worry, I’ll fix it for my grandmomma. I’m gon’ fix it.”29
DeLee’s questions about divine care and intervention and her child¬
hood determination that change depended on her own efforts reso¬
nate with views expressed by William Jones and Anthony Pinn in their
treatises about African Americans’ understandings of the relationship
between God and suffering.30
74 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

Hamers early recollections of religious instruction include her

mothers praying for her children. In contrast to DeLee, Hamer
describes her own childhood perspective as theistically affirma¬
tive. She anticipated divine assistance to support her desire to make
changes. “I began to make promises to myself,” Hamer recalled, “cause
I didn’t really know who to make promises to, and ... I really just
asked God because I believe in God; I asked God to give me a chance
to just let me do something about what was going on in Mississippi.”31
Although Hamers “prayer” involved seeking divine help, she resolved
to “do something” through her own efforts. In spite of Hamers early
theism, by questioning the value of hard work done by African
Americans—“I just couldn’t understand why Black people worked
so hard and never had nothing”—she implied an interrogation of the
Protestant work ethic that accompanied south¬
ern evangelical Christianity. Alongside its role as
On Freedom Summer
the source of wealth accumulation among some
For black people in Mississippi,
Freedom Summer was the beginning
individuals, the Protestant work ethic became
of a whole new era. People began intrinsic to the dominant cultural perspective that
to feel that they wasn't just helpless poor and working-class manual labor warranted
anymore, that they had come together. less financial reward. In this regard, as Hamer’s
Black and white had come from the observation implied, poor people’s hard work
North and from the West and even served only to keep the poor and the privileged in
from some cities in the South. Students “their places.”
came and we wasn't a closed society Having been inducted into the religiosity of
anymore. They came to talk about that
southern and African American culture as chil¬
we had a right to register to vote, we
dren, both Hamer and DeLee integrated Chris¬
had a right to stand up for our rights.
tianity into their family lives. As an adult Hamer
That's a whole new era for us. I mean
was a regular member at Williams Chapel Bap¬
hadn't anybody said that to us, in
tist Church in Ruleville, Mississippi. The DeLee
that open way, like what happened
in 1964.
family was active at St. John Baptist Church and

—Unita Blackwell, from Henry

then helped found the House of God Pentecostal
Hampton and Steven Fayer, eds., congregation, both in Ridgeville, South Carolina.
Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of Notwithstanding their induction into the South’s
the Civil Rights Movement from the and African Americans’ religious culture, both
1950s through the 1980s (New York: Hamer and DeLee demonstrated independent
Bantam, 1991), 193. critical views in regard to the meaning and prac¬
tice of religion for their lives. Hamer, for example,
 Rural Southern Black Women in the United States Ross 75

articulated the complex perspective that both affirmed how Christian

practices supported African Americans and criticized some black
churches and black church leaders for “selling out” or failing to suf¬
ficiently use the church’s moral and physical resources on behalf of
the poor.32 DeLee expressed critical disagreement with Pentecostals
who disparaged social and political engagement as “worldly” and in
conflict with the “holiness” emphasis of those traditions.33

CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVISM AS RELIGIOUS PRACTICE

The dawning of the civil rights movement and its progression into
rural areas of the South dramatically changed the ordinary lives of
people like Victoria Way DeLee and Fannie Lou Townsend Hamer.
Conversely, individuals like DeLee and Hamer considerably affected
the movement’s momentum as they helped shift the
meaning of becoming a black woman in the rural
South. In addition to bringing legal expertise that
challenged labor and other economic practices, the
civil rights movement brought resources and activ¬
ism that increased the number of independent black
farmers and provided employment options for black
workers. Moreover, the movement contributed to the
enfranchisement of millions of African Americans
whose participation in electoral processes changed
the status of black persons from peons to citizens,
thus altering southern politics. For some, the civil
rights movement provided the option (and some¬
times as a result of personal activism the require¬
ment) to change jobs. In southern rural areas, for the
more creative and assertive who saw opportunities to
become full U.S. citizens and change the status of black persons, the F'9- 2-5. A student worker
. • • u (Heather Tobis Booth) talks
movement meant they realized potentialities and opportunities that wj^ a woman in a cotton
otherwise would have been swallowed up in poverty, indignity, and field In Mississippi,

peonage.
The shifts that occurred in DeLee’s and Hamer’s lives were quite
dramatic, since both lived in close relationship to sharecropping and
76
TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

tenancy well into adulthood. This was especially true for Hamer, who,
still living as a farm tenant, was forty-four years old when she first
engaged civil rights practices in 1962. Because of their initiative and
determination, by the time of the movements waning both women
had developed careers as community activists and public figures and
had contributed significantly to setting in motion practices and ideas
for a “New South.” Christianity played no small role in changes that
occurred in these womens lives.
Like many other black southerners who initially encountered the
civil rights movement through their churches, Victoria DeLee first
learned of civil rights practices from her Baptist pastor, Reverend
R. B. Adams. As early as the 1940s Adams motivated congregants to
attempt voter registration. Already predisposed to help change the
South, DeLee responded to the potential she heard in Adams’s recom¬
mendations. DeLees successful registration and her pastor and con¬
gregation’s celebration of that success perhaps sealed for DeLee—at
that time still a young adult—her understanding of civil rights activ¬
ism as religious practice.34
With the support of her pastor, congregation, and community,
DeLee engaged the civil rights movement tenaciously. After formally
securing her own enfranchisement, DeLee encouraged other African
Americans to follow. Staying in the context of her initiation into the
movement, DeLee began her civil rights activism by visiting and
speaking to members at local churches. In addition to voter regis¬
tration work, DeLee agitated for African American exercise of their
franchise. In 1964, DeLee filed civil actions on behalf of her children,
challenging Dorchester County’s school segregation practices. Along
with her husband, S. B„ DeLee contested the racial and gender bias
of Dorchester Countys jury pool. DeLee’s ongoing participation in a
range of civil rights activities included leading boycotts and pickets to
open employment opportunities for African Americans, organizing
and encouraging African American participation in Democratic Party
precinct activities, and cofounding a third party, the United Citizens’
Party (UCP), in South Carolina. As the UCP’s first vice president,
DeLee was also the party’s first statewide candidate. In 1971 she ran
for Congress in the state’s first congressional district but was unsuc¬
cessful in her bid.
 Rural Southern Black Women in the United States | Ross 77

In keeping with the then-predominant religiosity of the South

and her identity as a Pentecostal laywoman, throughout her activ¬
ism DeLees self-representation was first and foremost as a religious
person. She says she and her husband left behind Baptist traditions
because they identified with the emphasis on “holy living” in the
House of God denomination. In a 1971 interview DeLee cited her
practice of “holiness” as a signature of her character and as defense
against charges that she was physically and verbally abusive toward
a police officer. The contrast of DeLees “holiness” defense with the
police reports depiction of her (“resisting arrest, striking a police
officer, and cursing and abusing a police officer”)35 is a provocative
example of the extent to which the colonial image of African Ameri¬
can women justified white supremacy, violent retaliation for civil
rights activism, and brutal treatment of black women. In addition to
this self-conscious “religious” self-representation, during a 1992 inter¬
view DeLee expressed emphatic satisfaction that her moral reputation
remained unblemished, especially in view of her interaction with men
throughout her activism: “I’ve never been accused of nobody’s hus¬
band, man or nothing, she said. Well aware of the pragmatic utility of
her moral practice, DeLee observed that black women supported her
because of this.36
The moral practice of “holiness” did not, however, become the
whole meaning of DeLees religiosity. Departing from the predominant
emphasis in early twentieth-century black Pentecostalism and from an
important concern of evangelical black Christianity, DeLee saw per¬
sonal moral piety as the beginning and not the end of living a religious
life. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both whites
who blamed black immorality and indolence for the plight of African
Americans and black elites who advocated racial uplift understood
moral piety as a combination of moral uprightness and industrious¬
ness. Moreover, in view of the postbellum and post-Reconstruction
social status of black Americans, moral piety became the dominant
mode of being an African American Christian. DeLees departure from
equating the whole of evangelical black Christianity with moral piety
is important. By rejecting this viewpoint, DeLee, like many other black
Christian civil rights activists, overcame the pious apologetic perspec¬
tive that had long shackled the social power of African American
78 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

Protestantism. Furthermore, as one of a few women among mostly men

in the movement, DeLee modeled in mid-twentieth-century Dorches¬
ter County a different way of being a woman. Although she was a wife
and mother, owing to her primary participation in civil rights activism
she was also a public figure. In taking up this role, DeLee broke with
reigning conventions that prohibited all womens public participation
and that particularly repressed black women.
As was true for DeLee, Flamer first engaged civil rights activism
in a church. Hamer volunteered to attempt to register to vote after
hearing of the possibility at a church meeting. Hamer’s encounter
with movement ideas and practices came not through her own pastor
but through student ministers organizing for the Student Non-violent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Christian Lead¬
ership Conference (SCLC) in Mississippi. SNCC and SCLC student
workers (including recent college graduates as well as active students
who took short- and long-term leave from study) left northern and
southern cities to support civil rights practices across the rural South.
Student workers noted Hamer’s leadership during her first registra¬
tion attempt: she led gospel songs that calmed her peers when police
began to harass the potential registrants. Students also encouraged
Hamer by providing employment as an SNCC field secretary, which
paid a regular, though meager, salary. In taking up full-time work
for SNCC, Hamer shifted her sociocultural identity from sharecrop¬
per-tenant to community activist. While this altered identity proved
beneficial, especially for future generations of rural black women,
trauma prompted it for Hamer. Immediately after that first registra¬
tion attempt, Hamer lost her job and home of eighteen years and
began to experience repeated retaliatory violence. The significance of
the SNCC salary for the Hamer family cannot be overestimated: the
loss of her job and home with the advent of her civil rights career in
August—during harvesting and preserving season—meant Hamer
did not have time to prepare her family’s ordinary winter food supple¬
ments. “That was a rough winter,” she recalled.37
In many ways Fannie Lou Hamer is a paradigm of what the civil
rights movement meant for southern rural African American women.
Hamer’s fame as an activist made her a searing example of the extent
to which racial segregation and racial subordination divested people
 Rural Southern Black Women in the United States I Ross 79

of opportunities and deprived society of their

gifts. Once she began SNCC work, Hamer quickly The New Kingdom in Mississippi
moved from local to statewide to national promi¬ To me, the 1964 Summer Project was
nence. In SNCC Hamer solicited others for voter the beginning of a New Kingdom right
registration, led citizenship training sessions to here on earth. The kinds of people
prepare potential voters for literacy tests that who came down from the North—from
obstructed their enfranchisement, and organized all over—who didn't know about us—
relief for persons suffering retaliation for their were like the Good Samaritan. In that
activism. Hamers natural intelligence combined Bible story, the people had passed the

with civil rights practices to make her an impor¬ wounded man—like the church has
passed the Negroes in Mississippi-—
tant leader of the Mississippi movement. Eventu¬
and never taken time to see what was
ally she became a national civil rights speaker,
going on. But these people who came
traveling across the country to secure funds and
to Mississippi that summer—although
other support for the movement.
they were strangers—walked up to
After massive voter registration efforts across our door. They started something that
the state during 1963 and 1964, Mississippi orga¬ no one could ever stop. These people
nizers strategized to replace the exclusive and were willing to move in a nonviolent
segregated state Democratic Party with the more way to bring change in the South.
inclusive, diverse, and newly formed Mississippi Although they were strangers, they
Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). Because the were the best friends we ever met.
MFDP held open precinct and county caucuses, This was the beginning of the New
its members argued their legitimacy over the “reg¬ Kingdom in Mississippi. To me, if I had

ular” Mississippi Democrats at the 1964 National to choose today between the church
and these young people—and I was
Democratic Convention (DNC). As MFDP vice
brought up in the church and I'm not
chairperson, Hamer riveted the national televi¬
against the church—I'd choose these
sion audience with testimony before the DNC cre¬
young people. They did something in
dentials committee. Unfortunately, power politics
Mississippi that gave us the hope that
trumped moral justice, and the Freedom Demo¬
we had prayed for so many years. We
crats lost their bid to be seated at the conven¬ had wondered if there was anybody
tion. As a result of the MFDP challenge, Hamer human enough to see us as human
joined other MFDP members as delegates at the beings instead of animals.
1968 DNC. After 1968 Hamer’s civil rights activ¬ —Fannie Lou Hamer, from the
ism took on a decidedly local, economic focus foreword to Tracy Sugarman's
through organizing for affordable housing and Stranger at the Gates: A Summer
cooperative farm programs. in Mississippi {New York: Hill and

Perhaps because she became so prominent Wang, 1967), viii.

and experienced many speaking and training

80 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

opportunities, Hamer developed sophisticated rhetorical construc¬

tions of her religious understanding of civil rights practices. She
clearly articulated her belief that the nature of Christianity is “being
concerned about your fellow man, not building a million-dollar
church while people are starving right around the corner.” In her fore¬
word to Tracy Sugarmans Stranger at the Gates, Hamer distinguished
the practice of Christianity from the church and church attendance.
Saying she would choose the community of civil rights activists over
the church, Hamer pointed to active compassion as a sign of Chris¬
tianity: “They did something in Mississippi that gave us the hope we
had prayed for so many years. We had wondered if there was anybody
human enough to see us as human beings instead of as animals.”38

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CLASS

Neither DeLee nor Hamer ever fully escaped poverty. Limited educa¬
tion coupled with their initial socioeconomic circumstances were so
substantial that these social markers prevented them from ever com¬
pletely realizing the benefits of their activism. A major focus of civil
rights activism included the morally compelling argument that all per¬
sons should be treated equally; however, circumstances such as those
at the 1964 Democratic National Convention revealed the trenchant
difficulty of overcoming U.S. social class barriers. Hubert Humphreys
spontaneous expression of the ultimate reason for objecting to Fannie
Lou Hamers being seated during the 1964 convention (“The President
will not allow that illiterate woman to speak on the floor of the con¬
vention”39) reflected his interpretation of President Johnsons perspec¬
tive about the place of impoverished, poorly educated former tenants
and sharecroppers in American society. Humphrey also articulated
the reality that physically and verbally apparent social class markers
could easily limit political opportunities and advancement.
In an important sociological text provocatively entitled The Declin¬
ing Significance of Race, William Julius Wilson cogently observed what
Humphreys statement reflected: “the problems of subordination for
certain segments of the black population and the experiences of social
advancement for others are more directly associated with economic
 Rural Southern Black Women in the United States I Ross 81

class in the modern industrial period.”40 Wilson also points out that
the primary African American beneficiaries of civil rights advances
were persons with formal education, which positioned them to take
advantage of professional opportunities that unfolded as a result of the
combined efforts of civil rights activists across the country.
DeLees and Hamers experiences of poverty and oppression
presented striking evidence of problems lingering from the antebel¬
lum racial divide in the United States. Their willingness to become
activists brought these problems to national attention. In this regard,
rural southern African American civil rights participants like DeLee
and Hamer helped change the meaning of becoming adults for rural
southern black women (and men). They also opened doors for many
other African Americans, doors that ultimately remained closed to
DeLee and Hamer themselves. The challenge of providing opportuni¬
ties denied to DeLee and Hamer remains. Rural and urban poverty
persist as major impediments to meaningful social participation and
advancement in the United States and around the globe. Collaborative
relationships across social class (and other) dividing lines—frequently
realized during the civil rights movement—are necessary to overcom¬
ing these barriers. Are there sufficient moral resources to help inspire
this in any contemporary forms of Christianity?

FOR FURTHER READING

Collier-Thomas, Bettye , ed. Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil
Rights-Black Power Movement. New York: New York University Press, 2001.
Crawford ,Vicki L., Jacqueline Anne Rouse, Barbara Woods, eds. Women in the Civil
Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941-1965. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1993.
Dittmer, John. Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi. Chicago: Univer¬
sity of Illinois Press, 1995.
Hampton, Henry, and Steve Fayer, eds. Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil
Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s. New York: Bantam, 1991.
Hine, Darlene Clark, and Kathleen Thompson. A Shining Thread of Hope. New York:
Broadway, 1999.
Lerner, Gerda, ed. Black Women in White America: A Documentary History. 1972.
Reprint, New York: Vintage, 1993.
Olson, Lynne. Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement
from 1830 to 1970. New York: Touchstone, 2002.
82 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

Payne, Charles M. I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mis¬
sissippi Freedom Struggle. 1995. Reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press,
2007.
Ransby, Barbara. Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic
Vision. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.
Ross, Rosetta E. Witnessing and Testifying: Black Women, Religion and Civil Rights. Min¬
neapolis: Fortress Press, 2003.
AFRICAN WOMEN
THEOLOGIANS

MERCY AMBA ODUYOYE

CHAPTER THREE

I will make sure that someday

Things will be different
As different as a woman
Protecting a man.
—Jeremiah 21:22

T he Circle of Concerned African Women theologians (the Circle)

claims this promise that God made to ancient Israel and so seeks
to achieve this vision of a different world. An Akan1 symbol of hope is
an open seed that means “There is something in the heavens; God let
it reach us.” This affirmation of hope for something beyond our pres¬
ent experience stimulates our work.
We date ourselves from 1989, but we stand on our holy scriptures,
cultural texts, and all that is women-friendly in our African cultures
and in our faith communities. The Muslims among us would say that a
woman protected the Prophet (peace be upon him). Historians among
us revive the memories of African women of note, and the Christians
would cite a Mary or two. If we cite only our words and works in this
account, it is because we found that our existence as women and as
women theologians has not been recognized by others in African
culture or in the church. Many have spoken and continue to speak
their words not simply about us but often purportedly for us and on
our behalf.

83
84 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

In October 1989 something happened at Trinity Theological Sem¬

inary (then College) in Legon, Ghana. African women in theological
fields gathered at a conference organized around the theme “Daugh¬
ters of Africa Arise.” The convocation was planned as an inspirational
event to motivate the participants to reflect on their lives as women
of faith with a specific vocation to do theology. Bible studies were
central, and cultural events featured storytelling and dramatics. At
the deliberative sessions during the nine days of encounters, the study
institute decided to inaugurate itself as a Circle of Concerned African
Women Theologians.
This “outdooring” of African women theologians coincided with
the Africa regional meeting of the World Council of Churches Ecu¬
menical Decade of Churches in Solidarity with Women. This was
organized by Omega Bula of All Africa Conference of Churches at
Lome, Togo. Bula was also at the conference at Trinity. In Nairobi, the
Pan African Christian Womens Association (PACWA) held its first
conference, “Our Time Has Come.” Founded in 1987, the PACWA
is the women’s forum of the Evangelical Association of Africa and
Madagascar. The year 1989, then, was when African women rallied
around the call to stand up.
What is new in the Circles efforts and in the history of African
women is that we tell our stories ourselves. The case is often made that
traditional African religions and cultures make room for requisite and
adequate participation for women. This ignores the fact of women’s
common experience in Africa that “by the time a woman has spent
her energies struggling to be heard, she barely has the energy left to
say what she wanted to say.”2 A people’s history expands and changes
when half the people whose voices previously have not been heard,
whose experiences have not been recorded, begin to speak.
The historical, cultural, and religious contexts for the beginnings
of the Circle can be found particularly in the last half of the twentieth
century in Africa. During the first half of the century, the continent
had endured the suffering of two “world” wars emanating from
Europe. The afflictions experienced were far more traumatic than
those caused by the previous colonial pillage. The growing awareness
of the extent of these afflictions and the reasons for them resulted in
an increase in global recognition of many different historical realities
 African Women Theologians | Oduyoye 85

and the unmasking of the fact that historical writings had recorded
only the stories of the powerful. “There began to emerge from the
kitchen the stories of people who cooked in other people’s kitchens so
that the hostess might be complimented while the men who worked
tirelessly for other men dropped their tools, saying they were not
women.”3 Poles of opposition began to solidify: black and white, rich
and poor, North and South. And there emerged as well the gender
question, experienced by most cultures as one of the oldest struggles
of humanity.
This question of the “natures” of women and men—What is
woman? What is man?—and the relationships between them in
African culture was sparked in new ways in 1985, four
years before the founding of the Circle, when the world’s
women met in Nairobi on the continent where men at
that time prided themselves on having women who had
no need to seek liberation. While the Nairobi meeting
was in session, African men were still snickering. But
something new had touched the women of Africa, and
they began to voice their presence. Women were stand¬
ing up, abandoning the crouched position from which
their breaths stimulated the wood fires burning under
the earthen pots of vegetables they had grown and har¬
vested. The pots, too, were their handiwork. Standing up
straight, women of Africa stretched their hands to the global sister¬ Fig. 3.1. Logo of the
Circle of Concerned African
hood of life-loving women. In no uncertain terms women announced
Women Theologians.
their position in the liberation struggle and their solidarity with other
women.
Before Nairobi there had been signs of solidarity, but it had been
crouching under North-South economic, racist, and militaristic strug¬
gles for power. In Africa the move by women to seek more humane
conditions for themselves was simply denied. When the women’s
efforts were detected, they were assigned to the cracked pot of West¬
ern decadence, unbecoming to Young Africa. Over time, African
women had learned to know their oppressors but had held their peace:
“When your hand is in someone’s mouth, you do not hit that person
on the head.” But Nairobi stirred something new among the women
of Africa, a desire to make themselves heard and their influence felt
86 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

in the culture and in the church. The Circle is part of this history. It is
also part of the history of the search by Africa’s peoples for something
new: not the changelessness of African tradition and not Christianity
in its Western forms, but nonetheless a Christianity that is at the same
time authentically African and authentically Christian.
In 1989, out of our cultural, social, religious, colonial, and mis¬
sionary histories, the Circle stated its goals as follows:

• to create a forum of women whose interests are in the area

of how religion and culture function in the lives of women;
• to publish documents for the academic study of religion and
culture;
• to contribute to research that leads to policies affecting
African womens development and their participation in
religion and society;
• to work toward the inclusion of womens studies in religion
and culture in the research carried out by institutes of
African studies at African universities and other tertiary
institutions;
• to enable African women in religious and cultural studies
to contribute to cross-cultural studies of contemporary
womens issues;
• to establish a network of women to monitor womens
interest in this area and to serve as advocates for the
inclusion of women in all deliberations in the field of
religion and culture;
• to promote the inclusion of specifically womens concerns in
the theory and practice of evangelism.4

If at first reading these goals sound more academic and abstract

than “of the people,” they resonate very deeply with the daily lives of
most African women: women of different classes, non-Christian and
Christian, urban and rural, rich and poor, educated and uneducated.
They speak to the experiences of women all over Africa whose family,
communal, and social lives are shaped by multiple forces, and “despite
their differences,” says Isabel Apawo Phiri, “they share a common
experience of oppression from patriarchal practices in the African
 African Women Theologians I Oduyoye 87

church and in society at large.”5 At the cultural-religious level folktales

of African cultures admonish all women to be silent and sacrificing
and always to put the corporate needs of family, clan, or nation ahead
of the personhood and gifts of the individual
woman. Numerous proverbs that are couched in
formalized language function as potent, authori¬
tative statements that in many different forms
convey the sentiment “Fear women” or suggest
that women are quarrelsome or demanding.
Equally powerful in their deleterious effects
on African women are the drastic changes in
their economic lives that have led to the associa¬
tion of women, and particularly mothers, with
poverty. For example, in the mother-centered
Asante culture, it is said that the child belongs
to the mother. Mothers-to-be are safeguarded by
taboos that insure their health and a safe deliv¬
ery. After the child is born, her or his welfare
becomes the responsibility of the community.
These protections, born of ancient wisdom, have
not been transported into the realities of contemporary economic and Fig. 3.2. Mother and Child by
social life. Thus, the woman’s capacity valued above almost all others ^959jdc^rtesy N°ati0naI'C3'
in African culture—to bring new life into the world—is bringing with Archives (Contemporary
it “the penalty of motherhood,” that is, to be poor. There are also the ^c32n^|tSelectLlstcollec"
horrors of widespread AIDS and the issues of sexual trafficking.
And then there is the church, which still asks questions like “and
women—where do they come in?” as if women were creatures apart
from the rest of humankind and not partners in the theological enter¬
prise. In response, the Circle asks, “Are women church’ or not? Are
women an integral part of the human race or not?”

STORIES OF ORIGIN
Over the years of its existence the Circle has become a phenom¬
enon that intrigues people not only in Africa but abroad. Even while
we were in the planning stages, we were already being stalked and
88 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

evaluated. People wondered, “Who are these Afri¬

Women's Leadership can women who call themselves theologians, and
in African Churches what are their concerns?” There are many perspec¬
With only a few exceptions, African tives from which to tell the story of the origins of
churches have resisted including the Circle. What one understands as the begin¬
women in leadership positions. The nings of the Circle depends on who is telling the
most common argument is no lon¬ story and for what purpose. Even as members of
ger theological but cultural: African
the Circle, we do not start from the same point.
cultures do not allow women to lead
Nyambura Njoroge begins with the World
men. African women theologians are
Council of Churches trajectory of women’s par¬
saying that such an argument seems
ticipation in the church and specifically with the
deliberately to ignore African cultures
consultation of nine women theological students,
that allowed women to be leaders at
shrines as priestesses and mediums,
including herself, held at Cartigny, Geneva.6
as well as those cultures that have Musimbi Kanyoro dates the beginnings to the
female queens and chiefs. There is initial group that met in Geneva to plan the 1989
then a contradiction in the way that meeting. Kanyoro notes specifically how the role of
the church in Africa has preached sexuality in African women’s lives was introduced
about the equality of all humanity in into the discussions, and out of this experience
Jesus Christ while in practice exclud¬ emerged her theological frame of “engendered
ing women from the Eucharistic min¬ cultural hermeneutics,” that is, not taking cultural
istry. Women demand that the church
norms related to gender for granted but analyzing
return to a Christ-like understanding
them in ways that will reveal what about them
of authority and ministry—a demand
is life-affirming for women and what is destruc¬
for inclusiveness in ecclesial ministry
tive.7 Bernadette Mbuy-Beya begins her Circle
and authority that is a quest for whole¬
story with her shock and other responses to her
ness in the church of Christ.
—Isabel Apawo Phiri, "Doing
discoveries in her work with women participating
Theology in Community: The Case of in transactional sex services and with children in
African Women Theologians her orphanage. At least one person—who can¬
in the 1990s," Journal of Theology not see how the African religious past, includ¬
for Southern Africa 99 ing its primal religious imagination and culture,
(November 1997): 73-74. can bequeath anything positive—has strained
to locate the Circle in European Enlightenment
and Christian missionary women’s work in Africa and several other
strands and roots outside Africa.
For some, the Circle’s origins are more institutionally oriented
than personal. The Brazilian theologian Virginia Fabella notes that
many of the African women theologians who were members of the
 African Women Theologians | Oduyoye 89

Ecumenical Association of Third World

Theologians (EATWOT), among them
Daisy Obi, Isabel Johnston, and me, had
leading roles in founding the Circle.
From where Fabella stands, the Circle
was designed on behalf of the African
women of EATWOT, and, in effect, the
Circle was in existence even before its
formal founding. Indeed, the history
of the Circle’s origins is intertwined
with EATWOT. The second EATWOT
dialogue in Accra in 1977, twelve years
before the official founding of the Circle, included African women Fig. 3.3. Musimbi Kanyoro,
who is also former Secretary
who later became members of the Circle. In 1983 a commission on
General of the World YWCA
theology from a Third World womens perspective was formed in and currently director of the
Population Program at the
order to create awareness of the realities of women’s subjugation, to
Packard Foundation. Photo
challenge patriarchal elements in theology, and to make sure that courtesy of Musimbi Kanyoro
and the World YWCA.
theology works for liberation. There were efforts as well during these
years to make sure that African women participated meaningfully in
EATWOT as well as in the Ecumenical Association of African Theolo¬
gians (EEAT). It was the 1981 EATWOT conference in New Delhi that
made feminists of us. I was particularly struck by the use of misogy¬
nist folktales from Africa for entertainment at the conference.
The politics of African women’s representation in EATWOT also
has a bearing on the prehistory of the Circle. As EATWOT grew, it
became impractical to have all members present at every conference. A
quota system was devised so that the three regions—Africa, Asia, and
Latin America—would have equal representation and the “minori¬
ties,” that is, North America and the Caribbean, would be present
with a lesser quota. A quota system that gave Africa fifteen to twenty
representatives naturally limited women’s access. This became a strong
motivation for us as African women in EATWOT to create our own
platform from which we could launch the few who would be selected
for these meetings. So we also worked on EATWOT themes while
pursuing our chosen fields of religion and culture.
When women raised their voices in EATWOT, the numbers game
shifted from continental representation to gender balance. EATWOT
90 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

decided to try for one-third women delegates, though some men said
there would not be enough women to fulfill the ratio.8 Establishing
the Circle revealed the lie to this assertion, often raised when womens
participation is proposed anywhere, and the Circle has fostered a
forum in which the many African women in theology could be con¬
nected with each other and have a voice.
All these different stories are well and good. After all, it is often
said that “there is nothing new under the sun,” and in Africa we say
that if we stand tall to reach the heights we aspire to, it is because we
stand on the shoulders of others. We made a conscious decision at the
beginning to do our own thing until we knew who we were and what
we were capable of. The aim of the Circle was stated as the quest “to
end the isolation and marginalization of African women in the study
of religion and culture.” This was not to be study merely for its own
sake but to begin the call for the integration of the study of religion
and culture in deciding the direction of social change in Africa.
The postcolonial efforts to throw a fresh light on Africa using a
torch held by Africans involved many aspects of life, but they were
not gender-sensitive. The goal of the Circle has been to change this.
We were so sure of our need to do this as African women that friends
from Europe who wanted to come to our first meeting were asked
to stay away. We needed space and could not tell what would hap¬
pen if we were forced to play to the gallery. The Circle wanted to be
an independent, multireligious association pursuing its own agenda
and concerns. We did not want to involve others until we had shaped
what we wanted to become. We made an exception for Africans in
the diaspora and had three women from outside the continent: two,
Jacquelyn Grant and Katie Cannon, from the United States and one,
Verna Cassells, from Jamaica. We were able to hold to this policy until
1996, the year we had planned to evaluate our efforts and make new
plans. In 1996, one British woman insisted on attending our meeting
after being told specifically that it would be inappropriate for her to
come. Later she interpreted this response as racism and neglected to
acknowledge the presence of white South Africans at the meeting in
Nairobi and in previous Circle publications.
With this in view, like the evangelist Luke, I say that many have
told of these beginnings. To add to it all, I now tell my own experience
 African Women Theologians Oduyoye 91

of the history of the Circle. I see it as part of womens participation

in shaping theology in Africa and therefore an attempt to touch the
ethos of religion in Africa in general and Christianity in particular.
For me, the Circle really began in 1976, when I felt the urge to find
other African women in theology.9 My friend and colleague Brigalia
Bam of South Africa had tried in vain for three years, 1967-1970, to
interest me in “women’s affairs.” We were both program staff working
for the World Council of Churches and living in Geneva. It took mar¬
riage in a patrilineal world and interaction with other African cultures
in Nigeria to motivate me. It was when I joined the Religious Stud¬
ies Department at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, that I became
gender-sensitive. Women friends at the University of Ibadan who
were also gender-sensitive helped me with the cross-cultural puzzles,
but there were no other women in theology. I needed to find them.

GENDER SENSITIVITY
In 1978, a conversation on womens liberation in the staff common
room of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ibadan led to a public
lecture at the Institute of African Studies. I delivered a paper called
“The Asante Woman: Socialization through Proverbs.” I argued that
African cultures have built-in beliefs, practices, and language that are
oppressive to women.10 The popular view, on the other hand, sparked
off by the United Nations declaration of a year for women, was that the
notion of women’s liberation was foreign to Africa and that African
women were not oppressed. The debate in the staff common room
as to whether or not this was the case and the response to the public
lecture convinced me that the time had come to seek out women who
would study the phenomenon more closely.
The primary root of the Circle for me, then, is the search for com¬
munity and solidarity with a focus on religion and culture. The Circle
began its life as “an ever-expanding group of women, with or without
formal education in theology, bound together in their common belief
that religion and culture are key in the liberation of the humanity of
religion.”11 I sought out women, but there were men who also shared
this concern for womens liberation. Even at that time some men were
92 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

willing to look positively upon the phenomenon of womens liberation

beyond the sensationalism of popular opinion and mass media pre¬
sentation of events. Soon thereafter, the theme of the annual religious
studies conference at the university was “Women in Religion and
Society.” Although I was in charge of the conference at that time, the
theme was not my idea. Walter Davis was the one who proposed it,12
and the idea was debated by colleagues in the department—all men.

FINDING ONE ANOTHER

The years from 1989 through 1996 were a period of finding one
another through local and national workshops and doing so in the
face of major obstacles. One of the major goals of the Circle was to
challenge the physical isolation of African women theologians. How
could women be brought together across the vast continent that is
Africa? For many years we had no e-mail, and the postal service in
Africa was more than precarious. We had to travel and meet in person;
funding air travel was and remains a challenge. Related to distances,
then, was the daunting task of financing all-Africa meetings. Another
challenge was linguistic diversity: the multiplicity of languages indig¬
enous to Africa as well as the European languages that are the heritage
of colonialism. And then there was the matter of what models to use
for our gatherings. First, there was the idea of institutes, for which the
Oxford Institute of Wesleyan Studies was the model. The Institute was
Euro-American but later became global in terms of the identity of its
participants. A core group decides a theme in consultation with all
interested parties, and a date is fixed to meet every four years or so,
always at Oxford, to hear and discuss the results of individual research.
This is an institute without its own physical structures, no academic
board, no examinations, and no certificates, but it has shaped many
lives and professions. The Circle was young, we were finding our feet,
and we needed to meet more often, so the planners envisaged meeting
every other year; hence the idea of biennial institutes.
The difficulties with financing an all-Africa meeting were met by
the decision to make the biennial meetings zonal and to have three of
them in six years. The zones took shape as follows:
 African Women Theologians Oduyoye 93

• West Africa English-speaking: Sierra Leone, Ghana,

Nigeria, and Cameroon (English). We were to make
contacts in Gambia and Liberia.
• French-speaking: Senegal, Cote d’Ivoire, Togo, Benin,
Cameroon (French), Zaire (Democratic Republic of Congo),
Congo Brazzaville, Rwanda, Burundi, Madagascar, and
Angola-Mozambique
• Eastern and Southern Africa English-speaking: Egypt,
Ethiopia, Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi,
Madagascar, Swaziland, Lesotho, South Africa, Angola,
Mozambique, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Lesotho.

In the seventh year we would evaluate and decide what to do next.

One of the major reasons for organizing around language zones
was the cost of translating. We were trying to save that money for the
pan-African meetings. Some countries had options, because individu¬
als had facility with more than one language. We had also used Swahili
at one of our planning sessions in Geneva. We still cherish the hope of
communicating in African languages. So far this happens only on the
local level and in small-group discussions in our own language areas.
This enables the women with whom we dialogue to say their own
words in their own idioms. This language issue is a challenge to all
Africa, and we women who take most seriously womens experiences,
words, and wisdom are caught up in it. The only theological work in
an African language by an African woman we have thus far is Jesus
of the Deep Forest: The Prayers and Praise ofAfua Kuma. The author
is a Ghanaian woman from an African independent church who was
recorded and published in Ghana by two Roman Catholic priests. The
Circle members have cited this book often to show that it is possible.
In the first seven-year period (1989-1996) the Circle had three
biennial institutes, one in each of the three zones. Meeting in Nairobi
in 1996, 124 conference participants affirmed the Circle but not the
biennial institutes; the experiences of seven years had taught us other
ways of organizing ourselves. That year we decided to stay together to
do theology that responds to the challenges of life in Africa, especially
those raised by women. Variety of history, perspective, and place con¬
tinued to characterize our members. Many of the women remained in
94 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

EATWOT, while some never sought membership

Grassroots African Theology in that organization. We all carried on with other
associations, theological and otherwise. As far as
He is the one
I know, we all remained committed to our faith
Who cooks his food in huge palmoil
pots.
communities. As political independence enabled
Thousands of people have eaten, erstwhile Christians, including politicians and
Yet the remnants fill twelve baskets. academics, to come out as Muslims, so the bold¬
If we leave all this and go wandering ness of finding our voices and learning more Afri¬
off— can primal spirituality and culture enabled some
If we leave his great gift, where else South African women, who had previously worn
shall we go? the label “Christian” to declare their allegiance to
traditional religions. Many of us have become aca¬
Those words [translated from the
demics, and a few more have entered the ordained
original Twi] are those of Madam Afua
ministry of their churches. Many are serving in
Kuma in her Jesus of the Deep Forest—
ecumenical positions as staff or resource persons.
Prayers and Praises of Afua Kuma
(English translation by Fr. Jon Kirby
And at least one was listed for nomination to a
from the Twi original; see Afua Kuma bishopric. She lost the election, but I know she
Ayeyi ne Mpaebo—Kwaebirentuw will offer herself again. When we said in Accra in
ase Kese; Acrra: Asempa Publishers, 1989, “We are the church,” we meant it.
1981), 38. I have sought previously to The Circle’s logo, the rising woman, was
show how the sort of "implicit" theol¬ inspired by a popular tourist artifact in Ghana.
ogy which is evident in her prayers and We did our own interpretation: women are on
praises can become a liberating force their knees but with head and hands held high;
for African Academic theology and
they are confident that God will bring them to
for the academic theologian. Being
their feet. We related the logo to the Talitha cumi
an articulation of an apprehension of
story in the Gospel of Mark, in which Jesus raises
Jesus "where the faith has to live" at
from the dead the daughter of Jairus: “Little girl,
"the living roots of the church," this
rise up,” he said to her. The rising woman repre¬
sort of grassroots or oral theology can
deliver the academic theologian from
sents for us human potential and possibility to
the burden of imagining that it is his image the divine. The idea and the final form of
or her task "to construct an African the Circle’s logo is the legacy of the late Reverend
theology" unaided. Sister Rosemary N. Edet of Nigeria.
—Kwame Bediako, Christianity in In terms of its overall organization, the Circle
Africa: The Renewal of a imitates some of the features of EATWOT. We
Non-Western Tradition (Maryknoll, have no paid staff, and tasks are performed by
N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1995), 59-60. volunteers. There is no permanent headquarters,
and therefore the Circle “resides” where the coor-
 African Women Theologians Oduyoye 95

dinator lives. In fact, at the beginning the Circle did not have officers.
There was just the initiator (me) and the team of people who orga¬
nized the first convocation and were recognized as conveners. After
the convocation, the members of the first institute went home from
Accra and created whatever model was suitable to their context. The
word “chapters" began to appear in Circle notes. Nigeria was the first
to name itself a chapter, elect officers, and print letterhead. This was
even before the Circle itself had created a logo. The form and designa¬
tion of leadership have followed the changes in organizational models.
The Circle remains flexible as it responds to the needs of its members,
their faith communities, and the continent. To date a constitution is
still in process.

THEOLOGY AND SOCIETY

The connections that many Circle members brought with them from
EATWOT meant that the Circle was to carry on the concern for the
elimination of “life-denying forces in Church and Society, especially
those rooted in ritual, racism, abject poverty and the neglect of the
rural areas. We had on our hearts the need to work with all who seek
to promote Christs message in all its fullness.”13 Those of us who
attended the 1980 Ibadan conference still nursed a vision of a two¬
winged (female and male) theology for Africa. We helped keep the
Circle focused on womens full participation in ministry and a vision
of the church as a community of women and men in the service of
God’s mission in Africa.
Theological themes such as Christology, ecclesiology, Mariology,
pneumatology (the study of the Holy Spirit), and spirituality had come
with us from EATWOT, but these traditional theological categories
had taken on the specific questions of our contexts. Ecclesiology, or
the doctrine of the church, has been a Circle issue that continues to
challenge womens meaningful participation in their faith communi¬
ties. The Bible and the interpretive strategies required to release its
liberating message remain with us. The preparation women needed
to enable women to be responsible participants in the church is a
constant concern. We are learning to articulate faith reflections on
96 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

womens realities; we read the

African Women and Beads Bible in the context of African
Beadwork is an art form I associate with my paternal religion and culture and to dis¬
grandmother, Maame (Martha Aba Awotwiwa Yamoah). cern what it tells women about
She participated in the fish trade in the Asamankese
who they are. We continue to
market and was happy nowhere else except in church.
search for what brings about full
The market was her life and she clung to it until she could
humanity for all, and we affirm
no longer see to get there. In the Methodist Church in
that rituals and marital issues are
Asamankese, she is remembered for her Ebibindwom
subjects for theological reflec¬
(songs of Africa), the lyrics she wove together from Bible
stories in church during sermons and sang at home while tion. As we seek life-renewing
she made threaded beads. Beadwork and singing, that is customs from African culture
how I remember her. She sorted beads out of an earth¬ that we might retain as possible
enware pot and threaded them for legs, waist, wrists and elements for transformation,
neck. Some of these beads were traditional hand-crafted we expose those that degrade
ones whose names held world-views and philosophies of women and provide stringent
life—precious black bota beads fashioned from solid rock, analysis of contemporary pos¬
mixed in with mass-produced European glass trade beads sibilities for undermining and
made from sand.
eliminating them.14
As I look at the world of African women today and
Right from the start we chose
reflect on that life in these pages, I think of beadwork. When
an option stated by Musimbi
I look at the variety of beads, I think of the changing being of
Kanyoro “to dare speak and write
the African woman; my grandmother, my mother, my self, my
about many subjects considered
nieces, and my grandniece: different beads from the same
pot, different shapes, sizes, colours, uses, ever changing
as taboo in African culture. The
patterns strung on new strings. I hear the deliberate, gentle, most courageous has been to
instructing voices of the older women evoke the rhythm of talk openly about sexuality.”15
sam-sina, the action of drawing a bead off the thread or Kanyoro singles out sexuality
pulling the thread through a bead. Women threading beads. “because it is the foundation for
I watch the different colours and I see a pattern emerge engendering cultural hermeneu¬
as they reject some beads and pick up others. Deliberate tics” that she has proposed and
choices and delicate handling, for every bead is precious spearheaded. Sexuality, fertility,
and none must be lost. Even those not needed at the
marriage, rites of passage, and
moment will go back into the pot along with those we have
several cultural practices such
not chosen. We appear only in beads of our choice, strung
as polygamy that are harmful to
on strong strings in patterns of our creation.
womens well-being have been of
—Mercy Amba Oduyoye, Beads and Strands:
deep concern to the women of
Reflections of an African Woman on Christianity in Africa
(Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2004), 102-3.
the Circle. Sexuality is also criti¬
cal because it involves issues of
 African Women Theologians I Oduyoye 97

identity and relationships in ones community. It is also inextricably

entangled with the AIDS crisis. In Africa, womens marginal partici¬
pation in their faith communities and some Christian communities’
resistance to the ordination of women have been traced to fear of
womens sexuality,16 and the cultural subordination of women has
been used to exclude women from leadership in the church.
By the time we came together in Nairobi in 1996, after seven
years of working in local, national, and zonal meetings, we found that
membership had grown and also that members’ interests had become
more diversified. We therefore set up four study commissions to
enable members to feel at home in their areas of interest. Each com¬
mission was coordinated by two women who had specializations in
those fields. The four commissions created at Nairobi were the follow¬
ing: Ministerial Formation and Theological Education, Biblical and
Cultural Hermeneutics, Women in Culture and Religion, and Women
in History.
From the beginning, the Nigeria chapter described the Circle
as “a human development project that will begin to provide a com¬
munication network among women in the Church and in academia
and the rest of society who find religious and cultural issues crucial
for the understanding of women’s lives.” The chapter’s approach was
interdisciplinary, using the model of traditional African women’s soli¬
darity groups. It was hoped that the Circle would become “a symbol of
Africa’s recognition of the necessity for a dialogical approach to reli¬
gious and cultural plurality in Africa and their practical consequences
for community harmony.”17
The 1990 meeting held at the University of Calabar was intended
to encourage participants to be univocal on issues that affect women,
but it failed. The early euphoria of finding our voices and agreeing sub¬
stantially on most human development issues seems to have resulted
in unwarranted optimism. We know that we cannot sing in unison on
all issues affecting African women, and we are, in fact, aware that this
nondifferentiation of women dehumanizes us. In a 1979 lecture and
later in a book, I disputed the Akan saying “Mmaa nyinaa ye baako”
(All women are one).18
Today in the Circle we recognize and honor the diversity in
the landscape. We still attract those who have our concerns. At the
98 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

same time, we remain open to others, especially if they prove to be

genuine dialogue partners. To date, however, no such formal dialogue
has taken place. The tension of acknowledging global sisterhood
and doing our own thing remains. As with the EATWOT Womens
Commission, “while we create a new thing, and are anxious not to
be classified as aping Western Women, we see the affinity, and the
need to honor the work done in this [Western] context.”19 Wherever
our work is, silence is no longer an option where women theologians
are concerned. Even womens silence could not go unheard, because
their lives spoke volumes. But now their voices are to be heard as well,
and as Nyambura Njoroge says, these voices call churches to listen
and to engage in conversation with Africa’s women. Theology in
Africa calls for acknowledging the role of gender in theology and for
eliminating its debilitating effects so that the church might be true to
its mission.

SPIRITUALITY
The Circle promotes a spirituality of resistance and transformation.
Total dependence on God makes us resilient. Anchoring our hope
in God means that the future can be secure. We of the Circle have
often been asked, “How do you cope, given all the many obstacles to
the expressions of our humanity?” As African women theologians of
Africa who form the Circle, we have decided to be open, to confront
life realistically, to let go of the coping devices and the trickster life¬
styles that are often the strategies of the oppressed, and to intention¬
ally face Africa’s issues with the eyes of women fashioned out of its
soil. We write from the perspective that the Bible is not the only text
from God. Like Zechariah we open our mouths only to speak God’s
truth and to praise God. We use creation stories and myths of origins
of our own lands. We read and listen to Islam and to Africa’s primal
religion.
We read the Bible cognizant not only of its patriarchal biases but
also of its colonial and imperial stance. We look at mission history and
ask, “Where are the Africans, what were their roles, and why?” We ask,
“Where are the women, both traveling missionary and African?” In the
 African Women Theologians Oduyoye 99

midst of asking these questions, we hold on to

the two Aramaic sayings from Jesus, Talitha cumi
and Eph’phatha, from Jesus’ admonition to the
man who was deaf and mute to open our eyes,
ears, and mouths. Claiming the power of the
Spirit, we weave our own stories of healing and
empowerment, confident that divine empower¬
ment knows no gender boundaries (Joel 2).
The struggle is our life, and our freedom
cannot be separated from that of our neighbor.
We question all that has become accepted as
normal, and we have out of the struggle created
a Circle of women and a supporting group of
men who believe in mutuality and empower¬
ment for the sake of humanity and the environ¬
ment. These are men who have been granted
dreams of a new earth and a new heaven, men
who like Jeremiah are willing to tell the world
that God is doing a new thing in raising up women to speak up and to Fig. 3.4. Annunciation of the
act out God’s justice and compassion. They are men who like Joseph Angel to Mary (carved wood
panel) by Lamidi Fakeye
have been sent angels to open their minds to the liberating work God (Nigeria). Courtesy National
Archives (Contemporary
does through those willing to go counterculture when the particular African Art Select List collec¬
cultural demand, provision, or norm stands in the way of the divine tion, #88).
will for fullness of life. And wherever religion and culture affect
human development, the Circle is sure to turn on the searchlight and
call on others to face the issues involved.

METHODOLOGY AND A "NEW THING"

We have been asked, “How do you work? What are your theological
frameworks?” The Circle did not start its research with theses and
theories. Circle women began with the realities of their African con¬
texts, their own and other African women’s experiences. We have sat
with women where they are. We speak their languages and have had
dialogue with them. Musimbi Kanyoro describes the Circle’s method
as that of storytelling—storytelling that leads to challenging cultural
100 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

associations based on fixed roles that are said to be divinely or cultur¬

ally ordained for women and men. We have learned from their stories
and double-checked with others. Kanyoro has also acknowledged
that “telling these stories does not come easily,” but oral transmission
of womens wisdom is an age-old method in Africa. Stories are the
basis of theology, and telling personal stories demands trust because
one is rendered vulnerable. Consequently, for the process to generate
not only theology but also healing, one has to create a safe environ¬
ment. The individual’s story becomes “our story,” and from that we
proceed to do our communal theology. Ours is a circle of solidarity
and of mutual mentoring, so care, trust, and freedom are crucial to
our cohesion.
The cultural, religious, and economic realities behind the stories
have provided data on the women’s lives. To understand and analyze
this data, we have resorted to the cultural and religious, especially
biblical, perspectives from which the women operate. We have lis¬
tened to the stories, our own included, and tried to understand them.
We continue to do so. We did not begin by constructing conceptual
frameworks, whether of patriarchy or of hermeneutics. We were cre¬
ating awareness of the existence of women’s oppression. Theological
frameworks have come later.
The “new thing” that has been brought to theology mainly by
studies of women from Africa—a new aspect of feminist analysis that
deserves its rightful place among theological paradigms—we call cul¬
tural hermeneutics, in fact, gender-sensitive cultural hermeneutics. It
came originally from the work of Musimbi Kanyoro, and it addresses
African Traditional Religion (ATR), with attention to the gender
implications of shrouded cultural elements that male theologians took
for granted and did not question. The motivating question is whether
or not these cultural elements foster the full humanity of women or
whether they diminish them. For the Circle, the church and all other
religious institutions are part of this review. Its ways of proceeding
include the rereading of the Bible and doing communal theology. It
also requires the kind of storytelling that leads to challenging cul¬
tural socializations based on fixed roles—whether in ATR or in the
church—that are said to be divinely or culturally ordained for women
and men and therefore unchangeable. Denise Ackerman, another
Circle member, also calls attention to lamentation” as another genre
 African Women Theologians I Oduyoye 101

that fits what Circle theology tries to do. This is a theology that chal¬
lenges all to action for transformation, for “we cannot do liberation
theology and locate it on non-liberating cultural practices.”20
All of these give “African women our own voices and space . ..
doing a theology inculturation for a gender and feminist perspec¬
tive is a new thing.”21 Gender as a factor in postcolonial analysis has
now been accorded its place in cultural analysis, and it gives African
women a distinct voice. We did not want to be shaped by Euro-
American feminism, as we felt it would undermine our credibility on
the African continent and become the excuse for bashing us before
we had been heard. We also did not see cultural analysis as playing a
critical role in Western feminist analysis. We have had affinity with the
womanist (African American) focus on class and the need to expose
racism’s strangleholds on all black people. But we were aware that our
African religio-cultural issues that produce harmful traditional prac¬
tices do not feature in womanism in the way we experience them. We
therefore stayed on a neutral path by describing ourselves as African
women theologians. This theology is communal but, as I have men¬
tioned before, not univocal. We honor and learn from the differences
among us as Africans as well as the differences between us and other
women theologians. To communicate our findings, we have resorted
not only to academic papers but also to liturgical, poetic, and story
modes, depending on our audience and the occasion.

MENTORING FOR WRITING

At the beginning, the focus on research, writing, and publishing
presented the Circle to the outside as an elite group of women who
were outside the rank and file of African women and whose research
findings therefore were not worth publishing. That the content of the
findings affects all African women, lettered and unlettered, rural and
urban, salary earners and nonsalary earners, traders, farmers, and all
other workers, young and old, was overlooked. We have persisted,
because these findings are African realities that rule our lives as
women in Africa irrespective of the diversity in social locations.
The convocation that created the Circle was a call for theological
writings on the theme “Daughters of Africa Arise,” anchored on the
102 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

Talitha cumi command of Jesus to the girl presumed dead (Mark 5:21-
43). The planners wanted African women to write about themselves,
their contexts, their faith, and their faith communities. They were
motivated by the need to contribute to the theology being developed
in Africa by Africans in such a way that it would indeed be a theology
crafted by both women and men. At the convocation and subsequent
meetings this need was repeatedly reiterated. The introduction to the
nineteen papers of the 1990 Nigerian national conference stated that
“the dearth of literature on women in Africa is an unacceptable reality.
Not only is such literature unavailable in libraries in Africa, but also
very little exists outside of Africa on what African women say about
themselves. This is particularly true when it relates to religion.”22
The Circle provides a safe space to create guidelines for research
and writing, and the hesitation to put pen to paper has been over¬
come. We meet to discuss research papers and critique them to enable
authors to finalize their thoughts. We search for publishing houses
willing to give us space, and we very often work to raise funds to have
our papers published. We are also trying to promote the Kenya Circle
model of having Circle members contribute to the publication of
their anthologies. We have had successes in the publication of Circle
works by presses in the United States, Europe, and Africa. This mutual
mentoring for writing and publishing has its roots in EATWOT, the
liberation theology forum to which much of the core group of the
founding members of the Circle belong. With Passion and Compas¬
sion, the outcome of a study by the EATWOT womens commission,
was our first experience of this way of producing our own literature
to share with the rest of the world. We have remained oral consultants
to one another, reading each others works and offering suggestions to
enhance effective communication.

AGENCY
One of the ten concerns of the Circle continues to be to insert gender-
sensitivity into theological education. Up to the time of the creation of
the Circle, there was no room for womens studies in religion, whether
in the departments of religion of state universities or in church col-
 African Women Theologians I Oduyoye 103

leges and seminaries in Africa. Indeed, some church colleges and

seminaries did not even entertain the notion of admitting women as
students. At Trinity Theological Seminary, where the 1989 convoca¬
tion took place, women were being admitted, but the college made no
provision for their accommodation until women raised the issue. It
is from this place that the Circle in Ghana is pioneering a continuing
education program and center to work for gender sensitivity and gen¬
der justice in that institution as well as churches and other faith com¬
munities. Trinity’s openness to this quest by women is demonstrated
by the existence of the Institute of Women in Religion and Culture of
the Seminary, the building of the Talitha Qumi Centre to house the
institute and other society-related programs, and the beginnings of a
masters program in women’s theology.
The Circle’s advocacy for women’s concerns in the mainstream has
had many practical results. The Kenya Circle is establishing a resource
center at Limuru that began with a gift from Charlotte Graves Paton,
which I received while participating in the Women and Religion
program of Harvard Divinity School (1983-1984). With that money
I purchased feminist books and lodged them in the Catholic Institute
for West Africa, the Department of Religious Studies at the University
of Ibadan, and the Department for the Study of Religion at Legon. The
Institute at Trinity Seminary will also have a resource center. Indeed, it
has already received many book donations and maintains bookshelves
in the seminary’s library. A Cameroonian project is on the drawing
board to provide French-speaking women with a center. The Centres
for Constructive Theology at the Universities of Durban-Westville
and Pietermaritzburg have become places for excellence in women’s
studies in religion. The Department of Religious Studies at the Uni¬
versity of Ghana and many others have begun women’s and gender
studies that focus on religion.
Not all the offspring are academic. The orphanage at Lubumbashi
in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, founded by Marie Berna¬
dette Mbuy-Beya, is an addition to her work with women sex work¬
ers. She is the same Circle member, a Catholic sister, who opened up
the issue of sexuality for examination. She began by speaking with
women in the profession and has remained an advocate and counselor
ever since. The participation of the Lusophone (Portuguese-speaking)
104 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

women is beginning another phase of Circle concerns. Women in

Angola and Mozambique would love to research and write, but very
few have the capacity or the means to do so. The Circle is developing
a mentoring program in theological writing, but the project the Luso-
phone women would like to take on is in the area of gainful participa¬
tion in the economics of their countries; the Circle is seeking support
and advice for this idea. To be relevant to our context is still our
central motivating factor. However, research, writing, and publishing
remain our raison d’etre.

THE CHALLENGES OF STAYING TOGETHER

The same challenges that made it difficult to find each other make it
equally difficult to stay together. The Circle shares Africa’s realities of
vastness, linguistic diversity, and the lack of resources to cope with
them. Poor communication and travel routes and cost can be a night¬
mare but are not insurmountable. In these days of e-mail, we tend to
forget that when we began in 1980 and even in 1989, e-mail was not
common. Africa’s postal service was unreliable. With finances one
can overcome the distances and even the language barriers at confer¬
ences. It is keeping in touch that is the real challenge. The linguistic
groups came out of the need to save money when we really would have
preferred to stay together. So we encourage those who can provide
interpretation to offer their services.
Logistics have not been the only challenge. We have also had to
address Africa’s religious pluralism. The initiators of the Circle were
Christian women, but those who were conscious that religion should
be a major area of inquiry. They had Christian colleagues who had
studied and were teaching Islam, but they were convinced that Mus¬
lim women in Africa have perspectives on feminism that the rest of
the world needs to hear. It was not acceptable that we simply talk
about them—Muslim women can speak for themselves. The colleague
who made all this possible was Rabiatu Ammah of Ghana, who deliv¬
ered a paper at the 1989 convocation and remains a Circle member. A
few Muslim women from South Africa were to join later. There is not
a critical mass of Muslim women who write, so the presence of many
 African Women Theologians Oduyoye 105

who have attended Circle events makes

this an empowering aspect of our being May We Have Joy
together. Few members would say they are
traditionalists, few are Jewish or Ffindu, but May we have joy
all consciously operate with a multireligious As we learn to define ourselves.
understanding. Africa’s triple religious heri¬ Our world, our home, our journey.

tage is honored in the Circle, but it is a real May we do so telling our own stories and
Singing our own songs,
challenge to “strive for community within
Enjoying them as they are or for what they
the context of difference.”23
may Become.
Plurality also takes many forms other
Weaving the new patterns we want to wear,
than religious. It makes us accountable
We continue to tell our tales of the genesis
on so many levels. We are accountable to
of our Participation.
the nonwriting women whose wisdom we We gather the whole household and begin a
transmit in writing. We are accountable to new tale.
the womens organizations whose praxis we Nse se nse se o!
participate in and upon which we attempt se se soa wo.
to reflect theologically. We are accountable
to our faith communities whose best prac¬ —Mercy Amba Oduyoye, Daughters of
tices and teachings we adhere to but whose Anowa: African Women and Patriarchy

nonliberating stance we dare to critique. (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1995), 217.

We are conscious that there is no such per¬

son as “the African woman,” and yet we hold ourselves responsible for
creating solidarity around our commonalities.

DIALOGUES AND ALLIANCES

In EATWOT, theological and cultural dialogue with others was always
the last step. This makes sense to us. We need to stand firm as a group
before leaping about. The women’s commission of EATWOT followed
this guideline. Eventually Circle members who are also members of
EATWOT participated in a dialogue that included European and
North American women, all meeting in Costa Rica. Dialogue happens
whenever we are invited to talk about the Circle or contribute to theo¬
logical debates. (To deepen our studies and widen our perspectives,
we are now participating in an initiative on HIV and AIDS sponsored
by Yale University.)
 106 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

Slipping out of our own comfort zones

to engage in religious dialogue with non-
Christians is yet to happen. We are active par¬
ticipants in other theological forums in Africa
that endlessly ask us to contribute and discuss
our perspectives. The Circle hopes to expand
and to interact with other circles, since the
need to engage in dialogue and make alliances
is basic to growth and creativity. We are people
who take religion seriously and will work to
Fig. 3.5. Mercy Amba make it a life-giving factor in human history. We are a circle, not a
Oduyoye, the director of the
Institute of African Women
closed circuit.
in Religion and Culture of
Trinity Theological Seminary
in Accra, Ghana, speaks to So this is my story
participants at the confer¬ A story rooted in an act of faith
ence, "Access for All: Faith
Communities Responding" in A yearning for community
2004. Photo: Paul Jeffrey/ And the need to be in mission on Gods side.
Ecumenical Advocacy Alli¬
ance. Used by permission.

FOR FURTHER READING

Dube, Musa W. Post-Colonial Feminist Interpretations of the Bible. St. Louis: Chalice,
2000.
Edet, Rosemary N., and Meg A. Umeagudosu. Life, Women and Culture: Theological
Reflections. Proceedings of the National Conference of the Circle of Concerned
African Women Theologians. Lagos, Nigeria: African Heritage Research and Pub¬
lications, 1990.
Fabella, Virginia. Beyond Bonding: A Third World Womens Theological Journey. Manila:
EAT WOT and Institute of Womens Studies, 1993.
Kanyoro, Musimbi. Introducing Feminist Cultural Hermeneutics: An African Perspective.
New York: Sheffield Academic, 2002.
-, and Nyambura Njoroge. Groaning in Faith: African Women in the Household of
God. Nairobi, Kenya: Acton, 1996.
Oduyoye, Mercy Amba. Beads and Strands: Reflections of an African Woman on Chris¬
tianity in Africa. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2004.
-. Daughters of Anowa: African Women and Patriarchy. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis
Books, 1995.
-, and Musimbi Kanyoro. Talitha, Qumi! Proceedings of the Convocation of Afri¬
can Women Theologians, Trinity College, Legon-Accra, September 24-October 2,
1989. Ibadan, Nigeria: Daystar, 1990.
Phiri, Isabel Apawo. “Doing Theology in Community: The Case of African Women
Theologians in the 1990s.” Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 99 (November
1997): 68-76.
HISPANIC WOMEN:
BEING CHURCH IN THE U.S.A.

ADA MARfA ISASI-DfAZ

. . CHAPTER FOUR

I t was a cold Saturday afternoon in December. Gathered in the back

of the unheated church were six women waiting patiently for the
Advent retreat to begin. I arrived with Carmen, one of the parish
leaders, who came loaded with a bag full of items to be used in the
three-hour retreat. Both of us were there to facilitate the retreat. After
the welcoming abrazos the group began to discuss where to meet.
The parish priest had told us to use the parish center, but the women
informed us there were no chairs. While Carmen went to the office to
find out where we could hold the retreat, the conversation in the small
group became a mixture of how busy the women were with Christmas
preparations and how disappointed they felt that so few had shown up
for the retreat. The women tried to encourage each other by remem¬
bering that Jesus had clearly assured his presence where two or three
were gathered.
A few minutes after the announced beginning time for the retreat,
the parish priest came in through a side door and, without greeting
anyone, disappeared into the sacristy. Eventually Carmen returned
with news that the group was to use a tiny room off the sacristy that
serves as a cloakroom. When the priest came back into the church,
Carmen went to talk to him, but he never greeted the other women or
in any way acknowledged their presence.
By then a few more women had arrived. Slowly we all moved to
the cloakroom and began to turn the space into a liturgical setting.
Chairs were arranged around a table that was draped with a purple
cloth Carmen had pulled from her bag. Three purple candles and a
pink one, together with a small circle of plastic greens, became the

107
 108 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

Advent wreath. A well-used Bible was placed on the table. Carmen

set up a small tape player, and Christmas music filled the air. By the
time the group was ready to start, half an hour late, sixteen women
had gathered. Two more would arrive during the retreat. Including the
facilitators, twenty women participated in the retreat.
Here they were, the pillars of this small church in El Barrio, the
name for Spanish Harlem, one of the Hispanic neighborhoods in New
York City. The Hispanic womens group of the parish, Las Madres
Cristianas, had organized the retreat, as they have done
for years in Advent and Lent.1 They had to ask the priest
for a place to gather, but they knew they themselves
had to do all that was needed to make the event hap¬
pen. They announced the retreat at Mass on Sunday and
spread the word around in the neighborhood, and in
the days immediately before the retreat they called their
friends to remind them to come. The women had found
facilitators, and they had bought with their own money
Fig. 4.1. Every Sunday, one two big bottles of soda, cookies, a cake, a loaf of bread, and cheese to
by one, those gathered for
the service on the sidewalk make sandwiches for the merienda they always serve.
outside the closed door Except for the sacraments, these women and a handful of men
of the church come up to
receive "spiritual commu¬ make everything happen in this church. On Tuesday evenings one
nion"—an official Catholic of the women makes sure there is a small group in the church pray-
tradition when consecrated
hosts are not available— ing the Rosary. On Wednesday another one leads a group of those
from the women who used
who have participated in the Life in the Spirit charismatic retreat. On
to be Eucharistic Ministers
at the closed parish. Photo Thursdays a third chairs the gathering of the Legion of Mary, whose
© Ada Marfa Isasi-Dfaz.
members come together not only to pray but also visit the sick and
Used by permission.
others in need in the parish.
This particular year the Advent retreat was very important for the
women. That they were gathering in this tiny cloakroom meant they
had succeeded, for the time being at least, in keeping the church open.
The archdiocese had announced nine months earlier that it was plan¬
ning to close this parish along with several others. These women and
some men in the parish had organized several protests. They demon¬
strated outside St. Patricks Cathedral the day of the Mass of the Holy
Chrism during Holy Week. They were able to attract the media, and
when asked on camera why they had chosen such a solemn archdioc¬
esan event to protest, they cleverly responded, “At the end of the Mass
the Cardinal gives us the Holy Chrism to take back to our parish. If
 Hispanic Women I Isasi-Di'az 109

they close our church, where are we going to

take the Holy Chrism?”
On the Spirituality of Protest
To protest the decision of the archdiocese Taking over our church so the cardi¬
they made posters to carry to the many meet¬ nal of New York wouldn't close it and
ings they organized. The posters read, “We are being arrested after staying for forty-
doing everything possible to keep our church eight hours—this is the most spiritual
open.” They gathered to pray the Rosary on the experience I have ever had.

steps ot the church so the whole neighborhood —Carmen Villegas in private conver¬

would witness their struggle. They met with sation with author, February 2007.

officials from the archdiocese and spoke power¬

ful words about their community and the vital role their church plays
in it.

CONTEXT AND BACKGROUND

This small church has been a national parish since it was founded in
the nineteenth century to serve the German community.2 As waves
of immigrants from different European countries swept north from
the crowded Lower East Side of Manhattan, this church, a very simple
building modeled after the Portiuncula (the tiny church St. Francis of
Assisi used in the twelfth century as the motherhouse for his group),
also served the Italian community that settled in this area after the
Germans. By the 1930s, the neighborhood was crowded with stores,
restaurants, and music shops reflecting a thriving Puerto Rican cul¬
ture. By the 1940s, Spanish Harlem was a recognizable area of Man¬
hattan. The church then began to serve the Puerto Rican community,
celebrating Mass and other sacraments in Spanish. The Puerto Rican
community, which is struggling to keep the church open, has been
living in the area since the 1950s. The neighborhood is once again
changing, and so are the parishioners. Surrounded by towering apart¬
ment buildings for low-income families, this church now also serves a
growing Mexican community.
The present struggle to keep the church open is a new moment in
the conflict that has existed all along between the Puerto Ricans and
the institutional church in New York City. Puerto Ricans arrived in
massive numbers in New York starting in the 1930s. This was a com¬
munity with a deep religio-cultural Catholic foundation. However,
110 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

unlike previous waves of immigrants, it did not

bring its own native clergy. The priests assigned
The Church as Family
to ministry in El Barrio as well as the institutions
"Who isthe mother ofthe Virgin Mary?"
asked Margarita Barada, addressing
of the archdiocese of New York have dealt with
the crowd getting ready to march to the Puerto Ricans using a so-called missionary
protest the closing of their church. mentality that does not value the faith of the
"St. Anne," shouted back the people. The “very institutional Northern Euro¬
crowd. pean Catholicism of the American Church” has
"That's right; she is our grand¬ clashed with Puerto Ricans’ traditional ways of
mother!" said Margarita. "And who is being Catholic.3 Their Catholicism, celebrated and
the mother of Jesus?" she continued. transmitted despite a historical shortage of priests,
"Mary," was the thunderous
centers on rituals and traditions that have no need
answer.
for an ordained minister. Celebrations in honor of
"Yes, Our Lady Queen of Angels
saints, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and Jesus, among
is our mother!"
other religious practices inherited from the Span¬
"And who is our savior?"
ish colonizers, are the way Puerto Ricans and other
"Jesus"
"Yes, he is our brother."
Hispanic people relate to the divine in their every¬
"And this church is our home, day lives without having to depend on the institu¬
and we will fight to keep it open," fin¬ tional hierarchy and a priest. These practices can
ished Margarita, as the crown broke be considered “an antidote to a highly clericalized
into cheers. religion that emphasized reception of the sacra¬
—Reported by Carmen Villegas ments as the primary expression of faith.”4 It is also
to the author true that once Puerto Ricans found themselves in
the U.S.A.5 their traditional ways of being Catholic
became a source of “identity and a way of connecting to their towns
and the people back in their country of origin.”6
The Catholic Puerto Rican ethos holds as extremely important
being baptized, married, and buried “in the church,” as the expression
goes. However, other religious practices that are not official church sac¬
raments do not need a priest but are led by the laity and are also of great
significance for the whole community. They are important not only to
those who go to church on a regular basis but also to those who do not
assist at Mass with any regularity. For the latter, participation in these
prayer services, such as novenas, processions, and Rosaries, is what
allows them to consider themselves members of a Catholic commu¬
nity that upholds Catholic values—many of which are also considered
cultural values. In fact, participation in popular religious celebrations
 Hispanic Women | Isasi-Di'az 111

is considered central to being a member

of the community.7
Whereas the Catholic Church has
served as an agent of “Americanization”
for various immigrant groups, this has
not happened with Hispanics. Catholic
Hispanics continue to hold on to their
Hispanic identity. There are geographic
and historical reasons for this. Previous
waves of immigrants, in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, came to
the U.S.A. to settle and stay here, never
going back to Ireland, Italy, Germany. Hispanics, however, relate to Fig. 4.2. Protesters gather
outside a historic parish
the U.S.A. differently. Some call themselves “Americans,” but many
church in Spanish Harlem
think of themselves as Puerto Ricans living in the U.S.A., as Cubans to protest its closing by the
Archdiocese of New York.
living in the U.S.A., as Mexican-Americans—never just “Americans.” Photo © Ada Maria Isasi-
For Hispanics what it means to be American is different from what it Diaz. Used by permission.

means to those of the dominant group. Hispanics are transnational

people living and contributing politically, economically, socially to
the U.S.A. but also relating to their countries of origin or those of
their ancestors. A significant number of Hispanics travel back to visit
family or the countries of their ancestry quite frequently Another
form of ongoing contact is the remesas mensuales—the monthly mon¬
etary contributions many send back to their families. The number of
Hispanics sending remesas mensuales is so large that there are whole
towns in various Tatin American and Caribbean countries that have
grown and developed economically thanks to the remesas. More than
half a dozen countries list the remesas as either the main source or one
of the main sources of national revenue. Politically, Hispanics from
many different countries that live in the U.S.A. are allowed to vote in
elections back in their country of origin, and they do vote.8 A steady
stream of people from Caribbean, Central American, and South
American countries immigrating to the U.S.A. continuously revitalize
Hispanic identity and culture in the U.S.A., which is why Hispanics do
not “Americanize” the way other immigrant groups have done.
There are also historical reasons why Hispanics relate differently
from other immigrant groups to the U.S.A. First of all, Hispanics
112 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

settled in what is today the U.S.A. before the Mayflower pilgrims

arrived, the event regarded as marking the beginning of this country.9
Then there is the fact that large portions of what was Mexico and all of
Puerto Rico were “taken over” by the U.S.A. as the result of an expan¬
sionist mindset prevalent throughout the nineteenth century. All of
these reasons give Hispanics a certain sense of entitlement about liv¬
ing in the U.S.A.
Other groups of Hispanics are here for political or economic
reasons for which the U.S.A. bears significant responsibility. Though
mentioned by only a few economists, today globalization involves not
only the flow of capital but also the flow of laborers.10 The ongoing
political discussion about immigration, which flares repeatedly in
the U.S.A., fails to acknowledge this flow of laborers as a worldwide
phenomenon of globalization. It also adeptly ignores what can be
confirmed by mere observation: were all those immigrants who are
undocumented, the majority of them Hispanics, to be forced to leave
the U.S.A., the service sector of the U.S.A economy would be severely
hampered.
In New York City many of those cleaning Wall Street offices are
Hispanics, as are the women who arrive on Fifth Avenue every morn¬
ing to clean the homes of the wealthy. Many Hispanic men work on
scaffolds in the heat of the summer and into the cold winter months
repairing brick walls and roofs. They are the dishwashers in famous
restaurants, they unload merchandise and restock shelves in grocery
stores, and they bike frantically through New York City streets deliver¬
ing take-out orders from restaurants. If Hispanic immigrants, particu¬
larly Mexican immigrants, were not able to come into in the U.S.A.,
the agricultural sector would be paralyzed, severely affecting the food
production chain. For all of these historical, political, economic, and
geographic reasons Hispanics relate to the U.S.A. differently from
immigrants from other areas of the world. These are also the main
reasons why Hispanics believe that they have a right to hold on to
their identity instead of wanting or agreeing to being assimilated into
the mainstream.
The fact that Hispanics have retained their identities has resulted
in the Catholic Church becoming Hispanic.11 Though the majority
of U.S.A. bishops are not Hispanic, at the beginning of the twenty-
 Hispanic Women I Isasi-Di'az 113

first century 39 percent of U.S.A. Catholics are Hispanic, and it is

projected that within the next two decades 50 percent will be Hispan-
ics.12 Contrary to what some may think, this does not mean a return
to following without questioning what the magisterium (the official
teaching office of the institutional church) teaches. Traditionally
Hispanics have considered themselves Catholics a mi manera (in my
own way). Orthodoxy, in the sense of following strictly official moral
and theological teachings, is not any stronger among Hispanics than
among Catholics from other ethnic backgrounds.13 If it is true that
Hispanics assist at Mass and other church services in greater number
than other racial and ethnic groups do at present, this does not trans¬
late into strict observance of church commandments and rules. When
one talks to Hispanic women, it is obvious that they follow their own
interpretation of what the church teaches, accommodating it to their
needs.
As a matter of fact, if there is one church teaching that Hispanic
women seem to give priority to is that of “primacy of conscience.” The
primacy of conscience is a principle deeply entrenched in Catholic and
Western moral tradition. According to this church teaching, though
one is obliged to do everything possible to have a well-informed con¬
science, including knowing and paying attention to church teachings,
one must ultimately follow the sure judgment of ones conscience
even when, through no fault of ones own, it is mistaken. This teach¬
ing leaves room for Hispanic women to decide for themselves how
they practice their Catholicism instead of unquestioningly following
what the church tells them to do. Primacy of conscience is a church
teaching that influences Hispanic women undoubtedly because of the
influence Catholicism has on Hispanic culture. In Hispanic culture
conscience is not something that comes into play only when consider¬
ing matters of grave consequence or when making critical decisions.
Conscience is invoked frequently but not lightly. Mi conciencia me dice
(my conscience tells me) is a phrase often used by Hispanic women. It
is not unusual for them to refer to conscience in regular conversations,
in discussions, and even when arguing. You hear Hispanic women
advising others to act according to their conscience, haz lo que tu
conciencia te indique (do what your conscience tells you); shaming
others for what they have done, parece mentira que no te remuerda
114 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

la conciencia (it is a shame you have no remorse); and indicating dis¬

agreement with or condemnation of what another person has done,
la conciencia no le va a dejar tranquila (your conscience is not going
to let you have peace of mind). This use of “conscience” in common
parlance is widespread.
To make it known that conscience plays a role in both minor and
important decisions lets others know that one has considered the mat¬
ter carefully and that one is invested in the situation. It is also a way of
giving oneself importance, of making it known that one reflects seri¬
ously, has an opinion of ones own, and is able to decide for oneself.14
Because conscience is their guide, Hispanic women follow church rules
and teachings they agree with and ones that help them in their daily
struggles. This is the “Hispanic way” of being Catholic, in contrast to
the “U.S.A. way” of being Catholic, which Hispanic women see as more
impersonal and much more institutionally oriented. The “Hispanic
way” is personal, people-oriented, and community-centered.

CHURCH AS FAMILY, CHURCH AS HOME

The idea that the church is the people of God, the community of
believers, is primary among Hispanic Catholic communities. The
institutional church should be at the service of the people of God.
Though grassroots Hispanic women may not articulate it this way, if
one pays close attention to what they say they need from the church
and what they complain about, it is obvious that for them the church
should be first and foremost a community and not an institution.
There has always existed tension between Catholic Church as commu¬
nity and Catholic Church as institution, but that is not to say that we
should settle for the latter. This is precisely what was happening that
Saturday afternoon when the women gathered for the Advent retreat
organized by Las Madres Cristianas. The women were not concerned
with the lack of institutional support for the retreat, seen in the facts
that the assigned place was not ready and the priest did not even greet
them much less stop by to see how the retreat was progressing. The
women were concerned with the lack of community participation,
with how few had actually come to the retreat.
 Hispanic Women I Isasi-Di'az 115

When Hispanic women are directly asked what they want from
the church, their expectations are quite modest. For them, being Cath¬
olic has to do with their own relationship with God—a relationship
fed by and expressed in their personal devotions, in the traditional
ways in which the community relates to the divine. Their faith in God
is unshaken, regardless of what those in charge of the institutional
church do, no matter how the priests fail to minister to them and with
them. Often when someone complains about priests, the women will
simply say, “They are only human.” It is moving to hear them excus¬
ing the priests. They overlook shortcomings, mistakes, and abuses
because their religious understandings and practices do not hinge on
priests and the institutional church.
Being Catholic for Hispanic women has to do with the religious
practices they were taught at home when they were growing up. They
have continued these practices throughout their lives, and they teach
them to their children and grandchildren. The institutional church for
them is important if it becomes a gathering point for them, if it helps
the community with the many problems it faces, and if it appreciates
their religious customs, participates in them, and helps to make them
happen.
One of the leaders in this church of El Barrio puts it this way: “I am
a little like my grandparents because they had a lot of faith. It was not
a faith based on the church.... My grandparents did not go to Mass,
and I go when I have to go, but if I am very tired or have something
else to do, I do not go. The rules of the church did not matter much to
them, and neither do they to me.”15 Rosa, another leader of this com¬
munity, who died a few years ago, used to explain how the church as an
organization provided a way of helping the community, an avenue for
her to exercise her leadership.16 There was little or no difference for her
between the reason she became involved in politics and the reason she
was involved in church groups. She explained how she took from the
church what was life-giving for her. She did not depend on what the
church says to know what was right for her to do in her own life.17
Margarita, also a member of this church, is involved in many of its
groups and activities. In one of the meetings in which the community
discussed ways to keep the church open, she was so exasperated with
the priests that she stumped out, exclaiming that she was not going
116 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

to put up any longer with all their stupid nonsense. This kind of open
rebelliousness, however, is very infrequent. Women have survived so
much that they are not fazed by anything that comes their way. They
tend not to react forcefully, no matter how hurt they are. The fact
that Margarita was so irate and walked out of the meeting indicates
how hurt the community is by the possibility that the church might
be closed. It is impossible for Hispanic women in this church and the
community at large to comprehend that the archdiocese would even
think of closing their church, much less without ever talking to the
church members. The archdioceses long study of shifts in Catholic
population in New York meant absolutely nothing to Hispanic women,
who do not think of the church as an institution but as home.
A few years ago Carmen, one of the leaders of the Advent retreat,
was part of a small delegation from Las Hermanas, a national Catholic
Hispanic women’s organization, that met with a bishops’ committee
seeking input for a pastoral letter. Since the women believed that the
church’s ministry was sorely lacking, the presentation included a long
list of grievances. One of the bishops asked the women why they did
not leave the Church if they had so many complaints. Carmen was
deeply insulted and hurt. Taking a deep breath, she blurted, “Leave the
church? What do you mean leave the church? The church is our home.
One does not leave one’s home; one does not leave one’s family!”18
This exchange is similar to what one hears time and again when
people suggest that if Hispanic women wish to be ordained to a
renewed priestly ministry, they need to join a Protestant denomina¬
tion that ordains women. “I cannot leave my church. The church is my
family. When you have disagreements in your family, you do not turn
your back on the family. You do not stop being a Perez, or a Rodri¬
guez, or a Diaz. You work it out. Family is too precious to abandon
over differences.”

BELIEFS, HABITS, AND PRACTICES

“The popular Catholicism I grew up with made no difference between
life and religion. This was a time when we knew how to forgive and be
forgiven embraced by the vulnerability of poverty that can indeed lead
 Hispanic Women I Isasi-Di'az 117

one to be self-centered. It was a time when we learned to depend on

Divine Providence. Even for the rain, so essential for us, we depended
on God, praying for it on Rogation Days. It was a time when we knew
how to be part of the communion of saints by praying numberless
rosaries for the souls of the dearly departed.”19 This way of believing
and thinking is quite typical of many Hispanic women. Their religious
beliefs are very personal, entrenched in lo cotidiano—the reality and
struggles of everyday life—and always involving the community.
Who is God for Hispanic women? How do they relate to God?
Here are, in their own words, some of the religious understandings of
two Hispanic women from this parish in El Barrio.

God for me is not a person. It is like a sentimiento—a deep

feeling, a force that moves me, which pushes me in difficult
moments. It is a force, something I cannot explain. But if they
would ask me to draw God, I would draw my grandmother
smiling because she is the only person that I believe has filled
me so much that I can compare her to God. I would draw a
picture of my grandmother with her hands open smiling, as
if to say, “Come with me because I am waiting for you.” God
is strength for the lucha—the struggle—a strength that keeps
you going ahead, that encourages. . .. For me it is always a
force that moves me and even if everybody would say that
I am bad, that I cannot do it, that force says that I can do it,
that I am special, that I am capable of moving mountains. But
it is something outside me that comes to me in the darkest
moments.

In difficult moments I pray to Jesus because I have him as my

guide. But, though many times I do not dare to say this [pub¬
licly] , I pray a lot to my grandmother.. . . [When my grand¬
mother died] she never went away from me, she always stayed,
and in difficult moments I pray to her.... Sometimes I feel
that her strength [in me] is so strong that I can . . . [do] any¬
thing. ... I never say this aloud, but she is my favorite saint.
The other ones [saints] I respect but I never pray to them; only
to her and to Jesus.20
118 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

As a child Rosa had been raised by her aunt, since the aunt did not
have any children. She talked about God this way.

I saw God as a compassionate being because in my childhood

I suffered so much, I suffered so much... . After she [the
aunt] took me in, she got pregnant and had a daughter. And,
naturally, the world just flowered for her and she gave all her
love to her daughter. She gave me all I needed materially, but
that motherly love—no, I never knew it. God became that
love of a mother and a father that I never had. ... I see God
as a brother, as a friend, as a father, as a mother, as a super¬
natural force. I am confident that God is with me always; the
more down I feel, it is as if a supernatural force would lift me
up; it gives me positive ideas on how to keep going; this force
helps me to realize that I am not alone. No matter how alone I
am, no matter how much it seems to me that the whole world
is falling on me, and that maybe I have no means [of mov¬
ing on], no doors to open, that all the doors are closed, I feel
something that, at times I say, speaks to me. Especially when
I am lonely, which is when one thinks about ones sufferings
and problems the most, something places the thought in my
mind that I can do it, that this is the road that I have to follow,
or this is what I have to do in order to struggle with what is
happening to me.... I see [God] as if thinking about so many
problems which all of us throw on top of him . .. trying to
find a solution to these problems. ... I would definitely draw
God as an extended hand, ready to lift up, to lift up whoever
goes his way.... It is the hand that picks you up and gives you
the strength to keep moving ahead.21

Grassroots Hispanic women have a sense of the divine that

includes the Trinity as well as Mary the mother of Jesus, the saints, the
faithful departed. They relate to all of them as friends and family. They
talk to them in a casual way, and they strike deals with them as one
does with friends and family. Though many might call the promescis
Hispanic women make and keep superstitious, that is not so. Hispanic
women are not ignorant or fearful of God. They do not trust in magic
or chance or have a sense that they can cause God to act or not to
 Hispanic Women I Isasi-Diaz 119

act. Their promesas—lighting candles, saying prayers, dress¬

ing in the color of their favorite saint—are ways of relating to
the divine. Just as one chats with family and friends, they chat
with God and the saints in their prayers. When they share their
troubles and heartaches with God, they are neither complain¬
ing nor expecting God to intervene in a supernatural way to fix
what is wrong. They share with the divine for the same reason
one does with other human beings: because they need support
and encouragement.
An example of this is one of the favorite songs of Hispanic
women to the Blessed Virgin Mary. In this parish it is sung
during the service and procession of the Sorrowful Mother that takes Fig. 4.3. The women of
place Good Friday evening when the women, and some men, come to Spanish Harlem dress a large
statue of Mary in a black
accompany Mary, whose son, Jesus, has just died. velvet cape and put a white
handkerchief in her hand.
She is called La Dolorosa,
Dolorosa, de pie junto a la cruz. Sorrowful One, standing by the cross. "the Sorrowful One." When
the women take her out in
Tu conoces nuestras penas, You know our sorrows,
procession on Good Friday
Penas de un pueblo que sufre. Sorrows of a people who suffer;.22 evening, they are accompa¬
nying the mother who has
just lost her son. Photo ©
In the song there is no petition for Mary to free one from suffering. Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz. Used
by permission.
The emphasis of the song is on empathy: the women empathize with
the Sorrowful Mother, and they know that the Sorrowful Mother
empathizes with them. They expect God, Mary, the saints, and the
dearly departed to accompany them, to walk with them as they face
the difficulties of lo cotidiano—everyday life.
Knowing that they are not alone, that they belong to a community
that cares for them, is what gives them the strength to continue their
daily struggles to survive, to provide for their children. Surviving as
members of a minority group who are not given much importance
by society or the church, Hispanic women hunger for God, Mary,
and the saints to pay attention to them, to gaze upon them lovingly.
This is the sense one gets when one sees Hispanic women kneeling
before the statue of Mary: it is not so much a matter of their praying
to Mary for what they need but of knowing that Mary is looking lov¬
ingly upon them.
Many Hispanic women now in their forties, fifties, and older were
taught as children to fear God, to see God as judge and punisher. Yet
they seem to have outgrown that negative understanding of God, and
120 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

they relate to the divine in a very personal and posi¬

tive way. Though they repeat all that the church teaches
regarding salvation, they do not see themselves as hor¬
rible sinners. Their sense of salvation is not so much one
of being redeemed from sin but one of participating in
the divine.23
Gathered in the house of one of the parish leaders, a
group of them talked about their relationship with God,
about the meaning of their faith, of how they live their
faith.
Two of the women were in their thirties, and the rest
were in their fifties and older, the oldest was seventy-six.
Most of them were from Puerto Rico; two were from
Ecuador, two from the Dominican Republic. They all have
lived in the U.S.A. for more than fifteen years; some of
them arrived more than forty years ago. Two of them are
Fig. 4.4. Women pray before single; the rest are married and have children and grandchildren. In the
a painting of Our Lady of
Guadalupe on her feast day,
group there were several college graduates, while others’ formal educa¬
December 12. Photo © Ada tion was only at the grade-school level. All of them speak some English,
Maria Isasi-Diaz. Used by
permission.
but they continue to be most comfortable speaking in Spanish.
Most of these women had a very difficult time when they first
arrived in the U.S.A. The oldest Puerto Rican present that afternoon
captured all she had to go through at the beginning with a simple
phrase: y empezamos a luchar (“and we began to struggle”). Luchar—
to struggle—is the best way Hispanic women have of describing their
daily lives. She continued, “Thirteen days after I arrived, a friend found
me a job in a sewing factory.” She married right away. She worked, had
children, brought them up, and even went to school to learn enough to
be able to help the children with their homework. “After the children
came, I did not have much time to work with the church, but after they
grew up, I went back to help. I went floor by floor in the buildings of
the projects [housing subsidized by the government] with the nuns
looking for people to baptize.” Another of the participants emphasized
how hard Hispanic women work by saying proudly, “They do say we
are the labor force of New York City.”
The ones who arrived in the 1950s worked in factories strewn
all around Manhattan. They did not earn much, but those gathered
 Hispanic Women I Isasi-Diaz 121

believe that it was easier to survive at that time because five decades
ago there were more entry-level jobs, and rent-controlled housing was
available. The more recent arrivals, on the other hand, benefit from
having an established community to receive them as well as govern¬
ment social services better geared to help them than they were decades
ago. Some of the recent arrivals have received help from the church,
mainly information about the different city services they can use and
emergency help in the form of food and second-hand clothing.
One of the issues discussed by the group was Gods role in suf¬
fering. Most of them think that God must have a reason for allowing
suffering and that when they face obstacles they have to figure out
“what is God trying to teach me” or they have to believe that “God
must have other plans.” One of the women spoke of how she rebelled
against God when her father, to whom she was very close, died. “But
now I have learned not to ask God why. Who am I to ask God to give
me reasons for what happens?”
The oldest woman there was very clear that God does not want us
to suffer. “We suffer but that does not mean God wants us to suffer. If
we do not want anything bad to happen to our children, how much
less is God, how is Papa Dios [Daddy God—a common way for adults
to refer to God when talking to children and the regular way in which
children address and refer to God] going to want us to suffer?” All of
the women agreed that God does listen to their petitions, and they
are convinced that when they do not receive what they ask for, it is
because God knows it is not the best thing for them.
The group then discussed prayer. Only one of them reported using
some formal prayers. But all of them understand prayer as speaking to
God. The most senior member of the group spoke eloquently.

From the window of my apartment I can see some trees—

such beauty. And I am always there talking with God. Every¬
one who knows me looks up when they go by my apartment
because they know they will find me at the window looking
at the beautiful group of trees.
In the morning I always say, the very first thing, “Good
morning, Puerto Rico.” Then I talk to God. I thank God for
the miracle of life every morning. I thank God for my legs
122 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

with which I can walk, for my eyes, for having what I need to
brew a cup of coffee. And at night I thank God for the spiri¬
tual and material food he has given me, and I ask God to give
food to those who do not have any.
You know, people pray even when they do not have any
food. I remember that when I was a little girl in Puerto Rico
we lived better than we do now even if we were very poor. This
was because the women prayed the Rosary. Everyday, shortly
before noon a group of viejitas [an endearing term referring
to elderly women] would come to my grandmothers house.
They would sit on the wood we used for the kitchen stove and
talk and talk until they heard the bell for the Angelus [tradi¬
tional responsorial prayer to the Virgin Mary recited at noon
and at six p.m.]. Then they would pray the Angelus followed
by the Rosary. At the end they would have a little coffee and
serruchitos [cornmeal mixed with water and a little sugar and
fried].

Carmen, the parish leader who cofacilitated the Advent retreat, chirped
in right away, saying, “I like to speak with God.” She continued:

God understands me and is never going to be judgmental. I

do not use formal prayers but lately, after I turned forty, I feel
I need to reclaim what my grandmother taught me. I think
it is a matter of vindicating all that one refused when young,
which happened because we really did not understand. Now
one wants to pick it up once again; now we are hungry for
what we received when young.
Everything is a blessing from God. I have been given so
many opportunities. What I have learned about community
organizing and struggling for our rights I have learned from
the church. The church has given me many opportunities, like
inviting me to be a facilitator when John Paul II came to the
Youth Congress here in the U.S.A.
I think, If I do not defend the poor, who is going to do
it?” And I get up, and I speak. And I feel very powerful. I
remember that Scripture says that when we are the weakest,
 Hispanic Women | Isasi-Di'az 123

we are the strongest because Christ is in us. I believe that

Christ calls me especially to struggle on behalf of the poor.
God is present in my life. Everything that comes from
God is good. What is bad comes from me because I am
human. People might say that it comes from the devil, but I
think it comes from me, from my mistakes and weaknesses;
from my selfishness.

The women gathered in that group believe that the majority of His¬
panic people indeed have great intimacy with God. “Our culture
continues to be a religious culture.” One of them spoke about the
procession of the Sorrowful Mother on Good Friday evening. “When
we start, there are only a handful of us. But as we walk the streets
around the church, more and more people join us, including teenag¬
ers, and by the time we return to the church, we have more than one
hundred persons there to participate in the prayer service. If religion
were not important to us, we would be the same or less by the time
we return to the church.”
The group then addressed the question, why do you think people
ask you to pray for them? One woman said, “Well, they might think
that God does not hear their prayers.” However, the majority thought
that it is a way for people to connect. “It is a way of making a human
chain.” One of them explained it as follows: “There are two reasons
why people ask for prayers from others. When I
would ask Angelita [elderly church leader who
died the previous year] to pray for me when I was On Suffering
going to go to a conference, I asked her because We suffer but that does not mean

I needed her support, because I needed to feel God wants us to suffer. If we do not

that she was in solidarity with me. Others ask for want anything bad to happen to our
children, how much less is God, who
prayers because they feel so far from God and
is Papa Dios [Daddy God—a common
they believe you are closer to God.”
way for adults to refer to God when
Another theme the group addressed was what
talking to children and the regular way
they think is most important in the Christian
in which children address and refer to
faith. One of the women immediately said, “To
God], going to want us to suffer?
be authentic,” by which she meant that one has to —A seventy-six-year-old
act according to what one believes. Another one Hispanic woman
talked about “fighting any kind of battle for Jesus.”
124 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

A third one spoke of carrying the Good News

Speaking to God to the world. Four others talked about helping
I like to speak with God. God understands others. The first put it this way, “Jesus, being
me and is never going to be judgmental. I the son of God, came to serve. Why should
do not use formal prayers, but lately, after
we not do the same?” The next one referred to
I turned forty, I feel I need to reclaim what
the fact that Jesus helped others and added, “I
my grandmother taught me. I think it is a
help anyone that I am able to help.” Another
matter of vindicating all that one refused
one simply said what was central to the faith
when young, which happened because
was to help others. The fourth one talked
we really did not understand. Now one
about reaching out for those who are in need.
wants to pick it up once again; now we are
hungry for what we received when young. She added, “We are the arms of Jesus. He did
Everything is a blessing from God.... I much in a very short time, and I have to do
think, "If I do not defend the poor, who is the same.”
going to do it?" And I get up, and I speak. One of the women indicated that the
And I feel very powerful. I remember that heart of the gospel message is, “Love one
Scripture says that when we are the weak¬ another.” She went on to talk about each one
est, we are the strongest because Christ is having a special mission and about the need
in us. I believe that Christ calls me espe¬
to ask Jesus to help us discover her mission.
cially to struggle on behalf of the poor. God
The others said that what they had identified
is present in my life. Everything that comes
as central to the faith is what they consider
from God is good. What is bad comes from
their mission. Only one of the women said
me because I am human. People might
she did not know what her mission was: “I
say that it comes from the devil, but I think
know everyone has a mission, but I am still
it comes from me, from my mistakes and
weaknesses; from my selfishness. trying to find out what is mine. I am allow¬
—Carmen Villegas ing God to guide me, to show me what is my
mission.”

A DEPLORABLE AND SAD ENDING

Barely a month had gone by since I gathered with the women to reflect
on our religious beliefs and practices as Hispanic women when the
archdiocese communicated its intention to close the parish in a mat¬
ter of weeks. The women immediately decided they were not going to
accept the decision made by the officials of the archdiocese. They began
to organize to take over the church until the archdiocese rescinded its
decision. The closing Mass was to take place on the last Sunday of the
 Hispanic Women | Isasi-Diaz 125

month. But when church officials changed the

locks of the building, the community decided it
Protecting What Is Important
was time to move in.24 A score of parishioners Margarita's daughter called me say¬
went to the regular Spanish Mass on Sunday and ing that they were taking the statues
then simply stayed in the church. When after the of the saints from the church and
last Mass in the evening the priest asked them her mother had gone to stop them.
when they were going to go home, they told him, I was very concerned for Margarita

“When the archdiocese changes its decision.” because she is into her seventies

The community at large was very supportive, for sure. When I got there, she was

bringing food, blankets, and flashlights to the ones confronting the men who had put big
boxes in the truck. She kept telling
staying in the church. The second evening the
them, "Open those boxes, you are
archdiocese sent in security guards. The women
not going to take our saints." All of
had already informed the police of their intention
a sudden she climbed into the truck
to take over the church, so since the archdiocesan
and insisted that they take the boxes
guard scared them, they called the police to protect
down. "You are not going to take our
them. The police remained in the church and were saints," she repeated time and again,
nothing but kind toward the protesters. But later thrashing around on top of the truck.
that evening, when archdiocesan officials arrived I was worried she might have a heart
and requested that they evacuate the church, the attack. She is so strong, so strong.
police informed the women that if they did not The men finally left without the boxes,

leave, they would be arrested. One of the police even if they did not contain the saints.

sorrowfully told the women he was heart-broken —Reported by Carmen Villegas

about what was happening to the church, where to the author

his mother had been a parishioner.

The women who had taken over the church decided that the Mex¬
icans in the group who were undocumented and could be imprisoned
and expelled from the U.S.A. needed to leave right away. After praying
together, some of the others also left. Six women who refused to leave
were arrested and charged with trespassing on private property. Just
before she was arrested, Carmen, my co-leader for the Advent retreat,
said, “I can’t believe I have to be afraid in my own church. I can’t
believe the church is not backing us up.”25
Regardless of what they had endured, the community, led by the
women, was not willing to give up. When Sunday came,

about a hundred people gathered ... on the slushy sidewalk in

front of Our Lady Queen of Angels, a small Roman Catholic
126 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

church on East 113th Street that the Archdiocese of New York

closed last week. The doors were locked, but parishioners and
their supporters conducted an outdoor service, in Spanish
and English, without a priest.
Nobody performed the sacraments, but the crowd sang
hymns and recited the same readings heard yesterday in
Catholic churches almost everywhere. ...
“We are not going to move from here,” said Carmen Vil¬
legas, a protest leader. “We don’t care if there’s snow, if there’s
rain.” ...
During the service yesterday, the parishioners, from
infants to people in their 80s, were bundled in hats and
scarves. A young man held aloft a wooden cross decorated
with a painting of the Virgin Mary. Some of the elderly sat
on folding chairs, and television news trucks were crammed
into a cul-de-sac in front of the church. Among those who
addressed the crowd was City Councilwoman Melissa Mark-
Viverito.. ..
“What we are witnessing here today is not defiance,” she
said at the rally. “What we’re witnessing is faith and love.”26

Reflecting on what had happened the night they were arrested, the
women were particularly hurt by the archdiocese sending private
guards. “They have guards and we are armed with rosaries and Bibles,”
said one of the women arrested. “Really, what harm were we going to
do? 27 It was especially difficult for the women to experience the for¬
mality and coldness with which they were treated. “After the private
guards arrived, a monsignor read a letter from the pulpit saying the
church was closed. He didn’t greet us or in any way show interest in
us and why we were there,” said Carmen Villegas. “He had a red book,
opened it and said, ‘The church is closed.’ Then he began to tell us we
could go to Mass at St. Ann’s or St. Cecilia’s. He told us we had to leave
and that was that. As if this church were not our home, as if we had
no rights in this family called the church.”28
Hispanic women learned from the documents of Vatican II that
the people of God are the church.29 But the institutional church seems
to ignore this teaching found repeatedly in the conciliar documents.
 Hispanic Women I Isasi-Diaz 127

These Hispanic women see their resistance to the institutional church

as faithfulness to what they were taught by the church. Their fight to
keep their church open has to do with self-respect, with a deep belief
that church authorities cannot close their church without consulting
with them. They fight because they are afraid of what will happen to
them as they lose the physical center of the community. They fight
because this church is home for them; they cannot even begin to con¬
ceive that the archdiocese is doing away with their home.
What will happen to the church as it continues to alienate and
mistreat those who have lived their Catholic faith without wavering?
What will become of the institutional church as it continues to recen¬
tralize itself, taking back to Rome the decision-making power it had
given to national bishops’ conferences following Vatican II? What will
happen to the institutional church as it continues to see itself as an end
instead of seeing itself as being in the service of the community?
It is unimaginable that the cardinal of New York will rescind his
decision, though the Hispanic women struggling to have Our Lady
Queen of Angels reopen constantly remind themselves and everyone
else that miracles are always possible. The hierarchy has never been
willing to learn from those who do not bow to its authority. The male
magisterium has never been willing to recognize the presence of the
Holy Spirit in the community unless the community agrees with its
authority. But as the elderly women always remind the community,
“the cardinal and all the priests are. only human. They might not want
to know it, but we know God is with us—Dios esta con nosotros.”

FOR FURTHER READING

Badillo, David A. Latinos and the New Immigrant Church. Washington, D.C.: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2006.
Diaz Stevens, Ana Maria. Oxcart Catholicism on Fifth Avenue: The Impact of the Puerto
Rican Migration upon the Diocese of New York. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1993.
Gonzalez, Juan. Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America. New York: Viking,
2000.
Isasi-Diaz, Ada Maria. En La Lucha—In the Struggle: Elaborating a Mujerista Theology.
2nd ed. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004.
128 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

-, and Yolanda Tarango. Hispanic Women: Prophetic Voice in the Church / Mujer
hispana—voz profetica en la iglesia. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988. Reprint:
Scranton, Pa.: University of Scranton Press, 2006.
-, Timoteo Matovina, and Nina Torres-Vidal. Camino a Emaus—Compartiendo el
ministerio de Jesus. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002.
Orsi, Robert. The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem. 2nd
ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.
Perez, Arturo, Consuelo Covarrubias, and Edward Foley, eds. Asi Es: Stories of Hispanic
Spirituality. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical, 1994.
Tweed, Thomas A. Our Lady of the Exile: Diasporic Religion at a Cuban Catholic Shrine
in Miami. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Vidal, Jaime R. “Citizens Yet Strangers: The Puerto Rican Experience.” In Jay P. Dolan
and Jaime R. Vidal, eds., Puerto Rican and Cuban Catholics in the U.S., 1900-1965,
11-143. Notre Dame History of Hispanic Catholics in the U.S., vol. 2. Notre Dame,
Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994.
 Twentieth-Century Global Christianity
Part 2
TRANSFORMATIONS
TRADITIONS AND
ORTHODOXY
UNDER COMMUNISM

PAUL MOJZES
CHAPTER FIVE

T he Orthodox Church is profoundly hierarchical, with the lay-

people at the bottom of the pyramid. Viewed theologically, the
clergy are the sacred priesthood, while the laos (Greek for “people of
God”) are the royal priesthood of all members of the church of Christ.
Indeed, the clergy cannot conduct formal divine worship without the
presence of the laity, because in the eucharist the laypeople sacrifice
concurrently with the consecrated priest, though they are decidedly
not on the same level with the consecrated clergy in matters of gov¬
ernance and teaching the faith. Nor can there be a liturgy without the
clergy. Viewed sociologically, in contrast, the hierarchical structure of
the church is so firmly fixed that it appears as if the bishops and priests
are the church, while the laity are merely passive spectators.
The Constantinian model of church-state relations created a situ¬
ation in which the emperors, kings, patriarchs, bishops, priests, and
monks were the only movers and shakers in the church. The people, or
laity, were the consumers of religion who followed thoroughly tradi¬
tional patterns of canonical regulations interlaced and often modified
by ancient customs and folkways, sometimes intertwined with supersti¬
tion and magical practices remaining from pre-Christian times. Dur¬
ing the Byzantine period the concept of symphonia prevailed, under
which the emperor was Christs vicar on earth. His primary domain
was the temporal affairs of Gods people, while the patriarch governed
the spiritual domain, ideally in perfect harmony with each other.
During years of Muslim overlordship, when the Christian emperor
was replaced by the rule of the sultan, the millet system actually

131
132 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

strengthened the role of the patriarch and the

Christ's Church bishops (the hierarchy of the Orthodox Church)
Members of the church of Christ are because the Islamic state dealt with people on the
required to be all who have even once basis not of ethnicity but of religion. Therefore
heard the preaching of the Gospel. patriarchs and metropolitans were given not only
Required are all because all are religious supervision over their members but also
equally called by their nature in their
judicial and administrative responsibilities. As a
religious association with God.... To
sign of their religious as well as secular preroga¬
Christ's church belong all who main¬
tives the Slavic Orthodox usually call their bish¬
tain Orthodox belief; not only the just
ops vladika (ruler).
but also the sinners.
Orthodox churches, all of which consider
—Makarie, Metropolitan of
Moscow, Pravoslavno Dogmaticno
themselves to be collectively the one, holy, apos¬
Bogosloviye, part 2 (Sremski Karlovci: tolic, and universal church of Christ, are, unlike the
Serbian Monastic Press, 1896), Catholic Church (which makes an identical claim
166-67. for itself), organized more or less along national
lines. Usually the head of such a national church
is a patriarch (or metropolitan bishop) who governs it along with
the Holy Synod of bishops. Each autocephalous church is fully self-
governing, and the patriarchs are equal, though the ecumenical patri¬
arch of Constantinople is generally accorded the primacy of honor,
while de facto the patriarch of Moscow has rivaled Constantinople,
wielding occasionally more political clout among Orthodox nations.
Paradoxically, these hierarchical churches also practiced what the
Russians call sobornost, a term not easily translated into English. One
of its meanings is conciliarity,” with the additional connotation that
matters of faith and practice become established only when the entire
“gathered” (sobranie or sobor) church accepts them. All this changed
after the Bolshevik Revolution and subsequent Communist takeover,
first in Russia and other Soviet lands from 1917 to 1989 and then in
other Eastern European Orthodox countries (except Greece and the
Near East), from the latter half of the 1940s to 1989.

THE STARTSIMtD LAY THEOLOGIANS

Drawing an analogy from music, in which the virtuoso is distinguished
from the orchestra, one may classify Orthodox laity into two or perhaps
 Orthodoxy under Communism | Mojzes 133

three groups. First there are the laypeople who by

every measurement can be considered the Ortho¬ The Possessors and
dox virtuosos: the startsi, the king or emperor with the Non-Possessors
the nobility, and the lay theologians. Then there At the end of the 15th and beginning
are the common or conventional believers who of the 16th century in Russia there

resemble the orchestra. And one may add that was a controversy between the "Non-

there is also the audience or the public—a large Possessors" and the "Possessors."

number of people who are passive recipients of the The Non-Possessors argued that the
church should hold no lands, own
church’s gifts but are mostly onlookers.
no peasant serfs, and that the state
In Russian lands in particular one can find
should not intervene in religious mat¬
figures called starets, or “old man.” It is a refer¬
ters as there must be no coercion in
ence to men who practiced an intense spiritual
religion. The Possessors, who held
and ascetic life, mostly living in forests or caves,
opposite views, won.
dedicating themselves entirely to the Lord. Some —Paul Mojzes, Religious Liberty
may have been ordained, but most were not; they in Eastern Europe and the USSR:
should be counted as laity because they played Before and After the Great
no role in clerical officialdom—they were not Transformation {Boulder. Eastern
assigned any pastoral positions, did not come European Manuscripts, 1992), 51.
under jurisdiction of bishops or abbots, and
conducted no official liturgies or mysteries, but led a life of prayer
and fasting. Most had no theological or even basic education. They
resembled the third- and fourth-century anchorite monks in Pal¬
estine, Egypt, and Asia Minor who left the cities to struggle against
Satan on Satan’s own turf, the desert. They sought no followers but
somehow by word of mouth tended to gradually draw the attention of
people near and then far, often against their own wishes. People were
attracted by their simplicity and lack of pretension and fancy regalia.
Sometimes people were simply drawn by the strange appearance of
some of these desert figures, but often there were stories of miraculous
healings. Startsi became confessors and counselors—wise men of God
who could be trusted to provide unselfish and un-self-serving advice.
Zosima from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, to whom the
youngest brother, Alyosha, was so powerfully drawn, was the proto¬
typical starets.
Unlike the Roman Catholic Church, in which until recently most
theologians had been ordained clergy, the Orthodox Church pro¬
duced trained lay theologians who equaled the ordained theologians
134 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

in erudition and profound theologizing. Among recent lay theolo¬

gians are people such as Vladimir Soloviev, Nicholas Berdyaev, Sergei
Bulgakov, Justin Popovic, and Nikos Nissiotis. These theologians,
though not ordained, are part of the elite rather than the “people,” and
hence it will suffice merely to mention their important role.
Still another way for prominent laypeople, such as nobility and the
wealthy, to promote the faith in pre-Communist Russia was to build
chapels that were not part of the regular diocesan or parochial struc¬
ture. The chapels were meant for the reading of the hours, a liturgical
practice that did not require clergy. Some were roadside chapels, others

Glossary
Antimins—a linen cloth in which the relics of a saint are wrapped.
Antiphon—a sung response, such as in liturgical chant.
Autocephalous—self-governing, independent Orthodox churches that
maintain full ecclesiastical relationship with other Orthodox churches.
Chistka—Russian word for "purge." Usually referring to the elimination by
imprisonment, concentration camps, and execution of Communists
and non-Communists considered by Stalin to be enemies of the state.
The Great Purge (Velikaya Chistka) took place between 1936 and 1939
and is considered the period of the greatest persecutions in the Soviet
Union.
Constantinian model—the close relationship between church and
state established during and after the reign of the Roman emperor
Constantine the Great early in the fourth century.
Dvatsatka—Russian term for a group with a minimum of twenty people that
was needed to apply for registration by the Communist authorities to
permit the functioning of a church.
Icons— Stylized paintings considered windows to the eternal heavenly
reality.

Living Church/Renovationists—a schism by a small section of the Russian

Orthodox Church in the early 1920s with explicit Bolshevik sympathies
and with some reformist ideas that the Bolsheviks used to subvert the
patriarchal Russian Orthodox Church.
Millet—the organization of the Ottoman empire along religious lines, giving
various Christians and Jews the right of limited self-government.
 Orthodoxy under Communism | Mojzes 135

Glossary (cont'd.)
Old Believers—a schism from the Russian Orthodox Church in the seven¬
teenth century led by Archpriest Avvakum, who opposed the liturgical
and other reforms instituted by Patriarch Nikon. The Old Believers
later split into two groups, the Popovtsy (those retaining priests) and
the Bezpopovtsy (those without priests).
Parastos—from Greek, "standing with." A memorial service when the
family, friends, and other believers "stand with" the departed on
the fortieth day after the death and a year after the death.
Photian schism—one of the earlier mutual anathemas between Pope
John VII and Patriarch Photius of Contantinople in 863-867.
Slava/krsna slava—The family festival among Orthodox Serbs and
Macedonians commemorating the saint's day when by tradition, cen¬
turies ago, the family was baptized, having converted from paganism
to Christianity.
Sobornost—from the Russian sobranie or sobor, means "conciliarity,"
the gathered church. An Orthodox theological conviction that a
doctrine is accepted only when the entire Orthodox church agrees
with it.
Starets/Startsi—"old man/men." Saintly hermits who are adored by Ortho¬
dox laity and sought for miracles, counseling, and spiritual blessings.
Symphonia—the theoretically harmonious and equal relationship between
the earthly and spiritual rulers of the Christian realm, such as the
emperor and the patriarch. The Byzantine emperor was considered
the vicar of Christ on earth and in practice tended to have more power
than the patriarch.
Tsar— Slavic term for emperor, deriving from the word "Caesar."
Uniate—-formerly Orthodox churches that had signed an act of union with
the Roman Catholic Church, recognizing the supremacy of the papacy
but retaining most other Orthodox characteristics. The Catholics
call them Eastern Rite Catholics and look favorably upon them,
whereas the Orthodox use it as a term of derision and regard them as
apostates.
Vladika—Slavic term for bishops, meaning "rulers."
Vrbica—Slavic. An Orthodox holiday in the spring, named for young willow
branches used in processions to the church, particularly popular with
children.
136 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

were attached to an institution, and still others were part of a home or

were free-standing structures, such as in the north of Russia, where
there were fewer churches. Some in the last category became substitutes
for churches. Technically this could not be the case because in order to
celebrate a liturgy the church altar must have an antimins, a linen cloth
in which the relics of a saint are wrapped, and these were generally
lacking in chapels. No special liturgical blessing was needed for the
chapels; they were dedicated the same way a home would be blessed.
The chapel parishes were the smallest unit of Orthodox worship, but
since they were independent and some had been associated with the
Old Believers movement (see glossary, p. 131), the emperors and hier¬
archy succeeded in limiting the scope of the chapel movement.

THE ORDINARY LAITY

Ortho doxa in Greek or Pravoslavlje in Slavic (right praise) is an
appropriate name for this branch of Christianity: the central act of
faith is the liturgy of divine worship. The act of worship is meant to
temporarily lift the believer from the doldrums of daily life into a
heavenly environment. All of ones senses are engaged. Ones sight
focuses on the walls and floors often covered with frescos or mosa¬
ics from bottom to top, icons, windows, splendid clergy vestments,
candles burning. Sounds of the chanting by priests and deacons and
the singing of one, two, or even three choirs singing responsively some
of Christianity’s most glorious music fill the sanctuary. The smell of
incense is in the air. Worshipers taste the leavened bread that was
baked by a lay family and the sweet red wine for the eucharist, which
is mixed in a spoon and administered to people. (Those who do not
partake of the communion are given pieces of the bread, so they are
symbolically included in the church’s fellowship.) Even skin is engaged
in worship: those baptized are fully immersed three times in the water,
and worshipers are sprinkled by holy water as part of the blessing by
a priest. Lips touch the icons. Candles, mostly honoring the departed,
are burning whenever there are worshipers in the church. Confession
is whispered into the ear of a priest but in full view of other worshipers,
who are queuing up to confess their sins and receive a pardon. Fasts
 Orthodoxy under Communism | Mojzes 137

are observed. On Good Friday at midnight boards are hammered to

replicate the sound of Jesus being nailed to the cross. Orthodox ritual
is dramatic, symbolic, vivid, sensory, and simultaneously affirming
this life and focusing on eternity.
These acts cannot take place without a priest, yet Orthodox
theology emphasizes that it is God’s mysterious action rather than a
priestly act that changes the common elements into avenues of grace,
dispensed for the benefit of the gathered people of God. Sobornost,
the Russian term for the gathered community of Orthodox Chris¬
tians, is a powerful Orthodox theological concept: it maintains that a
theological truth does not become a teaching of the church when it is
promulgated by a patriarch, a synod of bishops, or a church council,
but when it is received and accepted by the entire church. Thus, for
instance, the signing of agreement for reunion by the Catholic and
Orthodox bishops at the Council of Florence-Ferrara in 1438-1439
was never accepted by the Orthodox Church, despite the fact that only
Bishop Mark of Ephesus refused to sign the document: the gathered
church felt that it was not an authentic expression of the will of the
entire Orthodox Church. The people were unwilling to accept the act
of the hierarchy. The Feast Day of Mark of Ephesus is now celebrated
as the Feast Day of Orthodoxy.
An important participation for the laity in liturgy was choral sing¬
ing. Orthodox worship bans instrumental music—the entire liturgy
consists of chants and choral music. While much of the chanting is
by priests, as is choral music sometimes, in most churches there is but
one priest, and therefore the choirs consist of laypeople. Sometimes
there are as many as three choirs in a church, usually men’s, women’s,
and one mixed, and they sing antiphonally, creating some of the most
beautiful liturgical music ever performed. Certain songs are well-
known by the congregation, which will join the choirs, making the
task easier in the three-hour-long liturgy.
No church is as rich with ritual and ceremonies as the Orthodox.
Typical Sunday liturgies last three full hours. Only a few of the most
dedicated laypeople come for the entire liturgy. Most people arrive
for the last hour, and even then there is a lot of milling around and
going in and out—perhaps not surprisingly, since in most Orthodox
Churches outside of North America there are no pews. Sometimes
138 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

there are a few lean-on chairs along the side of the church wall for
those who may be sick or invalid, but even that is not universal. Stand¬
ing is the order of the day. Astonishingly, even in the midst of Soviet
persecution of the churches, there were times when the churches
were packed with elderly people—mostly babushkas (grandmotherly
women), sometimes holding their grandchildren in arms, standing for
hours devoutly transfigured by the holiness of the moment in contrast
to the bleakness of their existence.

COMMUNIST CONTROL
It is fair to say that the oppression and persecution of Christians was
never so severe in the entirety of Christian history, even during the
Roman Empire, as it was under Communism. And it is likewise a fair
assessment that Communist control and persecution of religion was
more severe for the Orthodox than for other religious communities
and nowhere so thorough, cruel, and long-lasting as for the Russian
Orthodox in the Soviet Union.
Lenin was convinced that the Orthodox Church was the main
pillar of the tsarist system and that in order to demolish the Rus¬
sian empire one had to crush the Orthodox Church. Hence the vast
majority of the Orthodox churches in the Soviet Union were closed,
destroyed, or converted to other purposes, sometimes as museums
of atheism, thus perverting their very reason for having been built.
Sacred objects, such as icons, chalices, vestments, and liturgical books,
were confiscated from both church buildings and homes. At first these
actions were justified by the argument that church gold and valuables
were needed for the purchase of food during years of famine, but later
the valuables were collected allegedly for storing and preservation in
museums, to protect” them from some imagined harm. In fact, the
real purpose was to take them out of circulation in order to impoverish
or prevent church worship and piety. Moreover, people were prohib¬
ited from attending churches if they were employed by the state (the
state was the sole employer) and threatened with losing their jobs or
being imprisoned. This law was especially rigorously applied to those
who were employed in government and Communist Party bureau-
 Orthodoxy under Communism | Mojzes 139

cracy and education. Those who desired to attend worship services

despite the restrictions would usually do so in a distant place where
they were not recognized. Children younger than sixteen were legally
forbidden to have religious education or be taken to churches. Never¬
theless, grandparents, particularly grandmothers, would take small
children with them to worship. Under conditions of such repression
the only thought was survival and the defense of valuable traditions,
and therefore not much thought could be given to creative empower¬
ment of laity. When some democratizing innovations were attempted
by the schismatic Living, or Renovationist, Church, the Bolsheviks
manipulated it to control the Orthodox Church, and before too long
the main body of the church distanced itself from such experiments.
In other predominantly Orthodox countries (such as Bulgaria,
Romania, and Yugoslavia) the Communist parties adopted this pattern
from the Soviet Union, but it was less strictly implemented (except in
Albania, where all religions had become constitutionally forbidden).
The Orthodox churches were the most vulnerable to government
pressures because they were too large to escape the notice of the gov¬
ernment, as sometimes smaller Protestant churches could do. At the
same time they were not as robust in opposition to the government as
the Catholic Church, which was able to resist using the guise of papal
primacy—namely that the head of the Catholic Church did not reside
in a Communist land. The Orthodox hierarchies were directly pres¬
sured by the Communist government and sometimes caved in under
duress. Their resistance was weakened by a long tradition of being
submissive to temporal authorities, but also by the extraordinary
cruelty by which they were persecuted.
The successful control, penetration, and muzzling of the official
Orthodox Church leadership evoked disgust and condemnation by
both laypeople and some hierarchs who were not under Communist
control (for instance, immigrant communities in Western Europe,
Americas, and Australia). This unfortunately led to inter-Orthodox
antagonisms in which entirely new Orthodox denominations (such as
the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia) or schismatic epar¬
chies were created with much political agitation. The schisms were
political rather than theological, but they did have canonical con¬
sequences. Long legal battles as well as ugly physical confrontations
140 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

resulted; these cast a shadow on the Orthodox

The Church and Nationalism reputation. After the collapse of Communism,
Ecclesiastical nationalism is often when the extent of the cooperation of some of
underpinned by a conviction that if the the church elite with the Communists became
church is deeply rooted in the national known, this also led to much recrimination and
ethos, then the national ethos, the hostility within the churches. Gradually many
national culture, cannot survive with¬
of those schisms are being reconciled (such as
out the church.
the one between the Russian Orthodox Church
—Pedro Ramet, ed., Eastern
Outside Russia with the Moscow Patriarchate),
Christianity and Politics in the
though new ones, again usually for nationalist
Twentieth Century (Durham, N.C.:
reasons, are taking place (such as the Macedonian
Duke University Press, 1988), 8.
Orthodox Church breaking away from the Bel¬
grade Patriarchate).

TACTICS FOR SURVIVAL

The central Orthodox tactic for survival was a deep-seated belief
among many clergy and laity that Christs church had survived many
empires and political and economic systems over the two millennia
and that it would survive Communism as well. At times this did not
seem convincing, as Communism claimed to be the wave of the future
and its totalitarian approach appeared to swallow everything in sight.
In retrospect, it was a trustworthy approach that helped the Ortho¬
dox and other Christians living under Communism endure even the
harshest persecutions.
Orthodox experience under Communism varied from country to
country, from extreme restrictions in Albania and the Soviet Union
to greater permissiveness in Romania and Yugoslavia. In all cases
the Communist Party exercised strict control and supervision over
the activities of the churches. The persecution in the Soviet Union
caused a sharp rift in the formerly Orthodox population. A segment
of the population embraced a particularly intense, devout, mystical
faith, including martyrdom, while a larger segment of the people
rejected religion, becoming militant atheists. The majority retreated
into a mode of passive survival, retaining vestiges of the ancient faith
but manifesting little of it publicly. In the Balkans, except perhaps in
 Orthodoxy under Communism | Mojzes 141

Romania and Greece, the laypeople followed outwardly Orthodox

customs but tended not to be too engrossed in them. Atheists in those
countries tended to be less militant.
During the darkest days of the Stalinist chistka (purges), the hier¬
archy ot the Russian Orthodox Church was reduced to four bishops
in the entire land. It is estimated that between 1917 and 1943 nearly
three hundred bishops and forty-five thousand priests were martyred.
No one knows the exact number of active lay-
people tortured and executed, but their number
was in the hundreds of thousands, if not mil¬ Morality and the Orthodox Church
lions. Having noticed the tendency for nominal [In Romania the Lord's Army] aimed to

believers to become ardent believers, Lenin feared improve the morality of the Orthodox
faithful. Alcoholism was a particular
fanaticizing believers and said “the harder you
target.... [There was] the need for
hit a nail the deeper you drive it in”; he ordered
spiritual rebirth as an additional expe¬
a temporary relaxation of the persecution. But
rience to participation in the sacra¬
when Stalin took control of the Bolshevik Party,
ments of the church. Baptism needed
the severest persecutions resumed, reaching their
to become a living experience for the
climax in the second half of the 1930s. It seemed adult believer, and personal devotion
that the Communists would succeed in eradicat¬ became a prime emphasis in his spiri¬
ing religion. tual scheme of things.
In the Russian Federation of the Soviet Union —Alan Scarfe, "The Romanian
many churches were sparsely visited, mostly by Orthodox Church," in Pedro Ramet,
elderly women. Young people and working adults ed., Eastern Christianity and Politics

seemed entirely absent as a result of the great in the Twentieth Century (Durham,
pressure exerted upon them—threats of losing N.C.: Duke University Press, 1988),

good jobs or being denied entrance to the univer¬ 217-18.

sities. Some of the worshipers, however, seemed to

burn with zeal, showing occasional Western visitors icons with scenes
of the apocalyptic final judgment—particularly the vivid depictions of
the thousands heading for the burning fires of hell.
One of the tactics of survival was reliance on the utter devotion
of elderly laywomen. Some of the few remaining “working” churches
(the majority of the churches having been closed to all religious obser¬
vances and consigned to other functions, such as museums, storage
houses, concert halls, machine shops, bathhouses, youth clubs, stables,
and so forth) were full during liturgies on holy days. When they
came in from the freezing cold, worshipers—mostly older women
142 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

bundled up from head to toe—would warm up the sanctuary with

their body heat. They stood in rapt attention, some for an hour, oth¬
ers for the entire three-hour liturgy. Many of the elderly women held
grandchildren in their arms while they stood, and stood, and stood,
displaying astonishing endurance and devotion. When foreigners
would express concern to Orthodox clergy about church attendance
consisting almost entirely of these elderly women, they usually replied
knowingly, “there will always be elderly women.” One might say with
a fair degree of justification that it was the babushkas who kept the
faith alive.
In the middle 1980s I attended a conference in Zagorsk, Russia
at what has been renamed again as Saint Sergius Trinity Monastery,
to which the Moscow Theological Academy had been moved dur¬
ing Soviet times. The monastery is actually a medieval fortification
with many churches and other auxiliary buildings, including springs
of holy water. It is a famous pilgrimage site. People came from great
Fig. 5.1. Lay people on pil- 1 r ° ° r °
grimage to St. Sergius, Holy distances—literally thousands of miles and many days of travel—to
Trinity Monastery Zagorsk, attend the practically continuous liturgies, sometimes presided over
Used by permission. by bishops and the patriarch. Most seemed poor and tired, some prob¬
ably ill, but they stood in long
lines filling bottles or contain¬
ers with holy water, or sleep¬
ing under the open sky on
one of the available benches,
later to join the throng that
pushed and shoved into the
various sanctuaries, lighting
candles, listening to the reso¬
nant priestly chants and the
even more beautiful choral
music so typical of Ortho¬
dox worship.1 Frescoes and
other types of paintings on
church walls, floors, and
ceilings instructed the often
barely literate laity in bibli¬
cal stories. Since the fall of
 Orthodoxy under Communism | Mojzes 143

Communism, what is new is the many souvenir stands outside the

monastic walls, while among the pilgrims one can see soldiers and
officers, schoolchildren with their teachers—namely, people of all ages
instead of just the elderly women and an occasional old man.
Another tactic for survival was to emphasize the close connec¬
tion of the Orthodox Church with the nation. For example, when
Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, it was the Orthodox clergy
and laity urging the people to rally for the defense of the motherland
that resonated more powerfully with the average Russian than the
defense of the Communist system. Even during the repressive Brezh¬
nev era one could observe some startling nationalist phenomena, such
as the celebrations during a year in the 1980s in Tbilisi, the capital
city of Georgia, when Orthodox Easter and the May 1 festival nearly
coincided.
On Good Friday of that year I visited a large Orthodox church on
the main avenue that had two levels. I went first to the lower level. The
language of the liturgy was Slavonic, and a few older Russian-speaking
women were in attendance. When I went to the upper level, I was in for
a surprise. The church was overfilled with hundreds of mostly young
males ages fifteen to thirty—the group that is hard to find in Christian
churches anywhere. The language of the liturgy was Georgian. The
youthful worshipers were in rapt attention but obviously unfamiliar
with the flow of the liturgy. The explanation given was that “we are
here to show that we are Georgians and do not want to be Russified
and the Georgian Orthodox Church is one of the few public places
where Georgian is spoken.”
This provides an illustration of the important role that national¬
ism plays in Orthodox churches, particularly when this nationalism
is suppressed, experiences crisis, or becomes incensed. When the
nation is not threatened, there is less need for public identification
with ones church, but if the nation feels threatened, laypeople head
to the church. In Romania, for instance, even the Ceausescu regime
encouraged church attendance in Romanian Orthodox Churches in
order to offset the perceived rivalry with Hungarians and Germans of
Transylvania. And, indeed, lay Orthodox Romanians frequented their
churches in ways not seen in Bulgaria or Serbia, which are likewise
Orthodox but did not feel as threatened in the 1980s.
144 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

Divine worship is not the sole locus of Orthodox faith and practice.
Baptisms, weddings, burials, name days, feast days (such as the Serbian
slava, or family saints feast day), New Year, and
others are also occasions to glorify God and create
A Handmaiden of the Government
community. In Tbilisi after a church wedding, the
The Bulgarian Orthodox Church found
itself in an asymmetrical relationship
guests met in the home of the Armenian groom.
with the [Communist] government in People were wall to wall; tables were covered with
which ... it became a close hand¬ three layers of food and drinks. The grooms father
maiden of the government in promot¬ delivered a flowery rhetorical toast as only people
ing patriotism yet was hard-pressed of the Caucasus seem to be able to deliver. He was
by the government's virulent atheist careful to be politically sensitive, not knowing who
propaganda and control. might be among his guests. He toasted Brezhnev
—Paul Mojzes, Religious Liberty and the Communist Party; then with much greater
in Eastern Europe and the USSR:
passion and energy he pulled out the cross on a
Before and After the Great
chain around his neck, spoke of Armenia’s Chris¬
Transformation (Boulder: Eastern
tian roots and dedication to Christ, kissed the cross
European Manuscripts, 1992), 150.
repeatedly, and did not fail to mention Armenian-
American friendship for the benefit of American
guests.2 After this came the feasting, dancing, and merriment.
Ironically the Bolshevik regime strengthened the role of laity in
the Orthodox Church, though their aim was diabolic—to weaken
or destroy the church by minimizing the role of the clergy. The 1929
Law on Religious Associations stipulated that a dvatsatka, namely a
minimum of twenty adult members of a local church, may apply for
registration (and could be denied without explanation). Church build¬
ings were no longer owned by the church but by the state and might
be leased to the registered applicants, but they had to be maintained
as a personal responsibility of the applicants. The priest technically
became an employee of the congregation and could be removed by
the government at will.3 The legislation about the dvatsatka could be
and was abused by the authorities because the government frequently
infiltrated the group that sought registration with its own spies, some
of whom were atheists but were given the assignment to undermine
the work of the church. Thus it was that some of the people of “the
peoples democracies” worked for the demise of the church while
other people of God were heroic martyrs who sacrificed everything,
including their lives, to preserve the church from extinction.
 Orthodoxy under Communism | Mojzes 145

Other Communist governments, with the exception of Albania,

did not pass such drastic legislation. In Albania all religion was pro¬
hibited in 1967, thereby making it the only country in the world that
outlawed religious practice altogether in its Constitution of 1976.4
Bulgaria sought to emulate the Soviet Union, and in that country the
repression of religion was also very severe; in Yugoslavia repression
eased after 1953, and church life, while not free, was not as severely
curtailed. In Romania the Orthodox Church benefited most from the
governments attempt to control its sizable Hungarian and German
minority by privileging the Romanian Orthodox as a way of bolster¬
ing Romanian nationalism. Despite variations in repressive policies
from country to country, from denomination to denomination, and
from time period to time period it is an established historical fact that
Communist authorities controlled, manipulated, restricted, and often
brutally tortured and killed both common believers and church lead¬
ership throughout the region.
Another tactic of survival was abandoning the faith. One of the
most common ways of dissuading people from participating in church
activities such as worship was by threatening them with a loss of
employment. This was particularly true of military officers, people who
worked in government offices, and educators. Since the government
was the sole employer, with the minor exception of certain trades, such
as shoe repairmen or seamstresses, nearly the entire urban population
was threatened with job loss; highly educated people were threatened
with a transfer to menial labor (the deposed prime minister of Czecho¬
slovakia, Alexander Dubcek, became a streetcar conductor, some theo¬
logians were furnace stokers, and so on). Such threats were powerful
restraints to participation in any public religious celebrations, driving
religious sentiments into the private sphere—the family circle—or
sending people to worship services in a city where they were not recog¬
nized. To prevent schoolchildren from participation in certain popular
religious holidays, school administrations organized out-of-town field
trips. This was particularly true at Vrbica, when children parade with
weeping willow branches. Childrens absence on Christmas Day, which
was not a holiday, was particularly severely disciplined.
These and similar tactics caused very large segments of the
Orthodox laity to distance themselves from the church and faith in
146 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

God. Atheization of many previously Orthodox societies tended to be

greater than that of other religions under Communism. The retired
people were the only segment of the urban population that to some
degree overcame the fear of attending church services—hence the role
of the babushkas, who somehow preserved the faith on behalf of the
rest of society as if by proxy. Still, there were exceptions, such as the
few courageous young men who participated in the annual custom of
jumping into the cold or even frozen rivers to retrieve a cross chiseled
out of ice—an ancient Orthodox custom.
Rural people had a different experience. In the Soviet Union public
religious worship was almost entirely curtailed: church buildings were
razed, and there were not enough priests to serve the villages (except
the occasional exiled priests who were sent to a village in order to iso¬
late their influence). Thus the only remnants of religion survived in the
form of customs, private prayers, and hope for miraculous healings.
The same can be said of Albania, both rural and urban. It was very
different in Bulgaria, Romania, and Yugoslavia. There the government
decided not to supervise as closely the religious peasant population.
Most villages had churches and clergy. In fact, most priests came from
village families; for them becoming a priest was a social advancement.
Villagers tend to be much more traditional, because changes occurred
more slowly and they were less susceptible to Communist propaganda,
but they often obtained an inferior general education. It was the entire
village gestalt that favored the retention of a much higher degree of
religiosity in the villages. Villagers celebrated the various feast days
that had been connected to the agricultural cycle (start plowing on
a certain saints day, apples are ready for picking for Saints Peter and
Paul, harvest should be finished by another saints day, and so forth).
One of the principal Marxist doctrines was that religion belongs
in the private sphere, and the Communist governments attempted
to impose it strictly. Having accepted this premise of privatization of
religion, Orthodox laity succumbed to it as a tactic of survival and
in order to become more successful. While many people discarded
religion completely, others retreated into their homes. Many Ortho¬
dox homes retained an icon in the corner of a room with an oil lamp
or candle burning at the base of the icon, and people prayed to God,
the Mother of God, and their patron saint. When a child was born,
 Orthodoxy under Communism | Mojzes 147

often the mother alone or even the grandmother (sometimes surrepti¬

tiously) took the child for baptism.
People resorted to their Orthodox faith most tenaciously at
occasions of death and dying. Sometimes even atheists asked for
religious rites on their death beds, and their families gave them
religious burials. There were, indeed, communist burials, but they
were outnumbered by religious burials. The custom in most Eastern
European countries is to have death notices posted in public places.
From the death notice one could figure
the broad religious affiliation of the
deceased. A cross indicated a Christian
(with different shapes for Orthodox and
Catholic/Protestant), a crescent and star
a Muslim, a star of David a Jew, and
a five-pointed star a Communist. In
multireligious cities people continued
to be buried in their respective separate
cemeteries. Rituals of death were prob¬
ably the most successful way for the
church to demonstrate its relevance to a
religiously alienated population.
The Orthodox hierarchy empha¬
sizes right belief and canonical pro¬
cedure above all else, often sacrificing
charitable work, and therefore lay-
people generally have very little expe¬
rience of it. Prior to the Communist
takeover there had been Orthodox brotherhoods and sisterhoods— Fig. 5.2. Russian Icon of
Christ Pantocrator by Ivan
charitable associations of Orthodox laymen and laywomen who
Alexaev, c. 1900. Photo ©
promoted various charitable and cultural activities, such as hospital Art Resource, N.Y. Used by
permission.
and prison visitations, choral or folklore societies, and literary circles.
However, all these had been abolished by Communist legislation
based on the premise that the state is to take care of all social and
educational needs. In most parishes there was little or no community
life. Church life was entirely restricted to worship. Only with the
collapse of Communism did the government permit the reestablish¬
ment of some of these associations of Orthodox laypeople. Nowadays
148 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

they assist in hospitals, institutions for the mentally ill, prisons, shel¬
ters for the homeless, rehabilitation clinics, orphanages, and other
social, cultural, and educational institutions.
Religious education was even more difficult. Catechism used
to be taught in the pre-Communist period by priests in public and
private schools. But Communists nationalized all schools. Religious
education under Communism was often completely prohibited; when
it was not, few Orthodox churches could provide such education in
the parish. Schools were separated from churches, and priests had no
access to schools. Thus, catechesis simply vanished. People learned,
as in ancient times, from the many paintings and icons and from the
sermons, though these were often poorly understood because they
were typically delivered in an archaic form of the language (although
Orthodox churches used the vernacular). Orthodox literature was
practically nonexistent; only in Romania was there a number of theo¬
logical journals and books, but these were usually intended for the
elite rather than the laity.5 The Bible was neither available nor read by
the vast majority of the laity.
The Russian Orthodox and other Orthodox laypeople in the Soviet
Union especially held strong apocalyptic notions, undoubtedly as a
result of the severe persecutions by a government that many regarded
as the Antichrist. Many had become quite fatalistic, not at all surpris¬
ing given the powerlessness and even hopelessness of most of their
situations. Their faith was expressed in mythological or miraculous
terms that some scholars have called the first, or primitive, naivete.
In schools children were indoctrinated with rigid and dogmatic dia¬
lectical scientific materialism. Two dogmatisms collided in the minds
of many people. Some ended up accepting Marxist dogmas, while
others embraced insufficiently explained, presented, or understood
Orthodox dogmas. Thus, many believed in a literal creationist story
and did not accept the theory of evolution. Instead of using the widely
available but often crudely delivered medical services, they would pray
for miracles, travel long distances to search for a cure at pilgrimage
places or to obtain bottles of holy water, or else resort to magical rites
from dubious faith healers and fortune tellers. Fear of the devil and
demons seemed for many nearly as powerful as trust in God, angels,
the Mother of God, and the saints. Crossing oneself in the Orthodox
 Orthodoxy under Communism | Mojzes 149

manner (with three fingers and to the

right and then left), burning candles for
the departed, and celebrating parastos
(forty days after death and then again
a year later) were deeply ingrained folk
observances. Their religious belief was
by and large not only precritical but
sometimes also an admixture of pre-
Christian and literalist Christian.
Relying on religious folk customs
combined with ritual was another tactic
of survival. For the typical Orthodox
layperson religion is not primarily a matter of knowing the doctrines Fig. 5.3. Receiving the Eucha¬
rist. Photo courtesy of Srdjan
but of following rituals and customs. The liturgical year is replete with
Srdic, www.mojkordun.com.
holy days, major and minor. For the major celebrations—Easter, Pen¬
tecost, Vrbica, All Saints, the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, Mother
of God, and Christmas—there are colorful customs at home and in
the church. For Easter parishioners bring bread, colored eggs, and
other food to the church to be blessed—some eaten in the church,
some taken home. At other times priests go to the homes to bless
a newly built house, a family festival
or celebration, a wedding, a funeral,
or an anointment of the sick. Among
the Serbs and Macedonians there is a
unique holy day called krsna slava or
simply slava (the same word for “glory”
and “feast”) that celebrates each family’s
tradition of its conversion from pagan¬
ism to Christianity and baptism on a
saint s day perhaps a thousand years ago.
This becomes an occasion of a priestly
visit and cutting of a special bread with
a coin hidden in it. The gathered family and friends rotate the bread Fig. 5.4. Food brought the
the church for blessing.
and kiss it while the priest chants a liturgy and subsequently cuts or
Photo courtesy of Srdjan
breaks the bread ceremonially. Each person gets to break off a piece of Srdic, www.mojkordun.com.
bread, and the one who finds the coin is regarded as being lucky in the
coming year. This tradition was so deeply ingrained among the people
150 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

that despite attempts at prohibition during the Com¬

munist period, even members of the Communist
Party celebrated it, though stripping it of most of
its religious components. For many laypeople the
religious part seemed to take a secondary role to the
celebration, which involved eating, drinking, live
music, singing, and dancing folk dances; it lasted
anywhere from one to three days.
An important role played by laypeople is kum
and kuma (Serbian for “godfather” and “godmother,”
or at a wedding the best man and maid or matron
of honor). This role, which no longer seems to have
the same religious content as it did originally, is still
of great social importance—sometimes equaling or
even surpassing blood relationships.
One of the characteristics of peoples Ortho¬
Fig. 5.5. Bring the yule doxy, which many would rather overlook, was the entanglement
log into the church. Photo
courtesy of Srdjan Srdic,
with superstition and magic. Particularly among the village folk and
www.mojkordun.com. the less well educated there were countless stories, often claimed
as personal experiences, of encounters with witches and warlocks,
werewolves, demonic and benevolent
spirits, haunted places, the evil eye,
and all kinds of beliefs in good or evil
fortune. Magical formulas were used
during courting, weddings, births,
illnesses and deaths. Even priests
were involved in some rituals to
drive out the devil, but usually such
practices were more popular among
the people. Particularly popular were
the blessing of a new home as well
as repeated blessings during various
holy days, for which the presence of
Fig. 5.6. Folk dancing a priest was necessary. One might say that for many the more classical
outside the church. Photo
courtesy of Srdjan Srdic, Orthodox religiosity was being replaced not with atheism but with
www.mojkordun.com. superstition.
 Orthodoxy under Communism Mojzes 151

OTHER CHURCHES AND RELIGIONS

The Orthodox Churches are firmly convinced that the Orthodox are
the one, true, holy, universal, and apostolic church and that none of
the non-Orthodox churches have the pleroma, or fullness of Christ’s
body, in them. This belief is consistently proclaimed by the bishops
and the priests and fully embraced by the laity. Paradoxically the
people’s Orthodoxy may be a bit less antagonistic and simultaneously
less dialogical toward the non-Orthodox. The lay Orthodox perceive
themselves to be in the straight, uninterrupted line from Jesus Christ
and his apostles—the only church that has preserved the fullness of
the undivided apostolic church.
Roman Catholicism or “papism” (also called “the Latins” in the
past) is regarded as the main threat against Orthodoxy—even greater
than that of Islam—because the Catholic Church has asserted that
it is the one, true, holy, universal, and apostolic church. Regarding
the Orthodox as schismatics, the Catholic Church made numerous
attempts prior to the Second Vatican Council to bring the Orthodox
“back into the fold” and occasionally were successful in creating Uniate
churches—that is, former Orthodox churches that had become Eastern
Rite Catholic churches by accepting papal primacy. The word “Uniate”
is a word of derision in Orthodoxy, and the Orthodox consider the Uni-
ates to be a Trojan horse, often maintaining that no cooperation with
the Catholics is possible until the Uniates are returned to the Orthodox
fold, as they were after World War II in Ukraine and Romania. The
experiences of the Photian schism, the Great Schism of 1054, the Fourth
Crusade, the Council of Florence and Ferrara, the unions of Brest -
Litovsk and Uzhgorod, and many others are vividly implanted in the
minds of Orthodox. Even when both churches were persecuted under
Communism, there was very little contact between them. Of course this
did not necessarily mean that people in mixed neighborhoods did not
get along during the calmer times, but it was always easy to embitter the
believers, as happened in Ukraine, the former Yugoslavia, and Romania
immediately upon the collapse of Communism, despite the ecumenical
breakthroughs of Vatican II. In the 1990s, in the former Yugoslavia, the
wars between Serbs and Croats were often perceived by the participants
as wars of Orthodox against Catholics.
152 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

The Protestants are regarded as dangerous sectarians or even cult-

ists. While the hierarchies of the Orthodox churches found ways to
cooperate with some Protestant churches through the World Council
of Churches, the Council of European Churches, or even on local
ecumenical levels (for example, in Poland the Orthodox and Protes¬
tants had a joint theological school in Warsaw during the Communist
period), people’s Orthodoxy was not open to ecumenical cooperation
and dialogue. Most Protestants, particularly the “free churches” (Bap¬
tists, Pentecostals, Methodists, Congregationalists), often targeted
Orthodox believers for their evangelistic efforts since they usually
considered an Orthodox layperson as not genuinely Christian (“born
again”) and therefore a fair target for conversion. Members of the
Orthodox Church were frequently warned against associating with
the “sectarians,” and on the whole they heeded such warnings and
were not tolerant toward the “heretics.”
Islam was another monumental threat. All Orthodox countries
had been at one time or another under the domination of Islam. The
Russians were able to free themselves of the “Mongol Tartar yoke” that
lasted from 1240 to 1480 and thereafter actually reverse the pattern
by occupying many Muslim lands. But that was not the case in the
Caucasus or the Balkans, where Arabic and later Turkish overlordship
lasted into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The attitude toward
Islam was one of bitterness and often hatred. Since collective con¬
sciousness still dominates people’s psyches, many Orthodox felt that
they ought to revenge themselves against not only the conquering for¬
eign Muslims but also Muslim converts in their midst, who were often
considered traitors to their people and their faith. Even Communists
whose heritage had been Orthodox sought ways of converting the
Muslims back to the ethnoreligiosity of the mother group. Thus, the
Bulgarian Communist government sought (usually unsuccessfully)
to convert Pomaks (Muslims of Bulgarian ethnicity) and get them to
change their names to Bulgarian/Christian and take other cultural
steps to integrate themselves into the Orthodox milieu of Bulgaria.
The Orthodox Church’s relationship with Judaism has not ben¬
efited from Jewish-Christian dialogue and post-Holocaust theology of
the Catholic and Protestant churches. In Russia, Ukraine, Byelorussia,
and Romania, anti-Semitism was pronounced among some hierarchs
and the people. Among the Bulgarians, Macedonians, and Serbs, anti-
 Orthodoxy under Communism | Mojzes 153

Semitism was not virulent, and the number of Jews living in those
countries was small.
During the seventeenth century a serious schism split the Ortho¬
dox Church of Russia into the majority Russian Orthodox state
church and the minority Old Believers. The Russian tsars and the offi¬
cial church mercilessly persecuted the Old Believ¬
ers, who in turn split into two rival movements,
Popovtsy and Bezpopovtsy (Priestly and Priest¬ The Church and Political Dissent
Broadly speaking, the modern reli¬
less). During the Soviet period the Old Believers
gious dissent movement [under
were still subjected to persecutions—as were all
Soviet Communism] was set off by the
the others—and many of these churches were left
Khrushchev anti-religious campaign.
without formal clerical oversight, but they con¬
Certain believers, both lay and cleri¬
tinued an often clandestine existence. Yet they are cal, began writing to the leaders of
still not tolerated by the Orthodox. their churches, pleading with them to
Almost all Communist constitutions acknowl¬ be bolder in standing up for the rights
edged the historical role of their respective Ortho¬ of the community in the face of intoler¬
doxies in the formation of national consciousness. able state interference.
It was this aspect of the Orthodox church-nation —Philip Walters, "How Religious
symbiosis that played an ambiguous or para¬ Bodies Respond to State Control,"
doxical role. To fully control the nation, the in Eugene B. Shirley Jr., and

Communists felt that they needed to break the Michael Rowe, eds., Candle in the
Wind: Religion in the Soviet Union
ethnoreligious symbiosis. But when they wanted
(Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public
to strengthen the role of their nation over that of
Policy Center, 1989), 125.
other nationalisms, the Communists were eager
to exploit the historic ties of the Orthodox Church
to the nation and society and were willing, for instance, in Romania to
give fairly free reign to the Romanian Orthodox Church in strength¬
ening Romanian national consciousness. Toward the end of the Com¬
munist period (from about the 1980s onward) Serbian Communists
sought to harness the influence of the Serbian Orthodox Church in
their conflicts with Albanian, Boshniak, Croatian, and Macedonian
nationalisms.

RESURGENCE IN THE POST-COMMUNIST PERIOD

Since the collapse of Communism there has clearly been a return to
explicit religiosity in Orthodox countries and an attempt to regain the
154 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

privileged position of the Orthodox in their respective societies. Here

are some anecdotal examples from my personal experience:
It is a workday in the middle of August 2006 around eleven a.m.
at the Serbian Orthodox cathedral (saborna crkva; literally, council
church) in Novi Sad, capital of the Vojvodina province of Serbia. No
priests are at the church, but a small shop in the vestibule is open
for the purchase of candles, church literature, and small icons. One
by one, mostly younger and middle-aged women, some perhaps
students, walk into the church, crossing themselves. Their dress
is modern; some are in jeans. There is silence in the church. The
women—and an occasional man—respectfully proceed to a platform
on which lie diagonally two icons, one of Jesus Christ and the other
Fig. 5.7. Church of Saint of the patron saint. They bow and kiss the icon. One briefly kneels in
Sava in Belgrade. When
prayer. A young woman prostrates herself full length on the floor. A
it is finished, it will be the
second largest Orthodox few proceed to the iconostasis at the front of the church and briefly
church in the world). Photo
© Paul Mojzes. Used by
stop in front of some icons, occasionally crossing themselves. Just as
permission. quietly and without lingering, they leave the church. Some who had
 Orthodoxy under Communism | Mojzes 155

purchased a few thin, yellow church candles go to the candle holder,

where other candles are already burning, and ignite theirs on the
flames, pausing a moment, perhaps uttering a prayer for a departed
relative or friend or perhaps for someone sick, maybe praying for
success on an exam. There is much veneration of the Mother of God,
the Virgin Mary, who is venerated only slightly less than the Holy
Trinity. During the Communist period in the same church there were
distinctly fewer and usually much older women stopping for prayer,
but essentially the same practice prevailed.
In 2003 I visited in Ekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk during the Soviet
era) a very large, newly built church on the spot were the last tsar,
Nicholas II, and his entire family were executed by the Bolsheviks.
It is now well attended even at times when there is no holy liturgy. A
few priests mill around but do not seem to engage the people, who are
worshipfully moving around the cavernous sanctuary on two levels.
Like in Novi Sad they pause to light candles, kiss the icons, and pray
by bowing or occasionally kneeling or touching the floor with their
foreheads. A large number of high school girls, curious and with a
sense of awe, examine the interior, seemingly aware that in this loca¬
tion a historic tragedy has occurred, which is leading to the beatifica¬
tion of the tsar and his family.
A few years earlier, in an older church near the same location on
a bitterly cold day (twenty degrees below zero), baptisms were held in
the barely warm church. First, a baby was being totally immersed in
the water by the priests three times; then an adult man also stepped
into the large baptismal font—he was barefoot, and his arms and head
were also wetted as he was being baptized, while his family and the
curious crowded around the baptismal font.
People are no longer afraid of punishment, and many, but perhaps
not the majority, are now declaring themselves as believers and are
trying to catch up in being instructed in what it means to be Ortho¬
dox liturgically. A young woman in Skopje, Macedonia, heading into
the cathedral states that she is doing it because she sees that young
ethnic Albanians go to pray in the mosque and that perhaps Macedo¬
nians ought to show greater dedication to their church. A well-known
Macedonian poet on the other hand emphatically told me that he is
an atheist but is a Macedonian Orthodox. There are many like him
156 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

throughout the Orthodox lands. During the Balkan wars of the 1990s
many Serbs started to attend Orthodox churches, but it is not always
clear whether this is a religious or a national affirmation. Perhaps it
is both. Too little is yet being done to instruct them catechetically or
theologically. Attendance at liturgies has gone up considerably, and
more religious literature is being published. It will take time—twenty
years at least, according to Bishop Irinej (Bulovic) of Bachka—to raise
a new generation of well-educated priests who will be able to help the
people of God become mature, educated people of faith.

FOR FURTHER READING

Bourdeaux, Michael. Patriarch and Prophets: Persecution of the Russian Orthodox
Church Today. New York: Praeger, 1970.
Florovsky, Georges. Ways of Russian Theology. 2 vols. Belmont, Mass.: Nordland, 1972.
Lossky, Vladimir. Orthodox Theology: An Introduction. Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s
Seminary Press, 2001.
Meyendorff, John. The Orthodox Church. Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary
Press, 1981.
Mojzes, Paul. Religious Liberty in Eastern Europe and the USSR: Before and After the
Great Transformation. Boulder, Colo.: Eastern European Manuscripts, 1992.
Pospielovsky, Dimitry. The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime, 1917-1982. 2 vols.
Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984.
Ramet, Pedro, ed. Eastern Christianity and Politics in the Twentieth Century. Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 1988.
Schmemann, Alexander. The Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy. Crestwood, N.Y.: St.
Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1977.
Ware, Bishop Kallistos [Timothy], Orthodox Way. Rev. ed. Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladi¬
mir’s Seminary Press, 1995.
Zizioulas, John D. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Crest¬
wood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985.
EVANGELICALISM
IN NORTH AMERICA

MARK A. NOLL and ETHAN R. SANDERS

CHAPTER SIX

I n 1997 Zondervan, the evangelical imprint of HarperCollins,

published Sunday in America, a book featuring about 150 photo¬
graphs of American Christians at worship, at play, in the family circle,
and in the world. For prose to intersperse among the photographs,
Zondervan enlisted well-known personalities who could hardly be
classified as ordinary Americans, including Senator Elizabeth Dole
and former President Jimmy Carter. And the images, as inevitable
for such projects, featured less the quotidian and more the distinc¬
tive, the poignant, the cute, the striking, the unusual, or the photo¬
genic. Nevertheless, the book still provided an unusually illuminating
glimpse into the religious lives of ordinary American believers, a great
number of whom could be classified as evangelicals.
The books approach was ecumenical, with much space devoted to
Roman Catholics and mainline Protestants, and some to the Ortho¬
dox as well. Its many pictures of singing, preaching, baptism, family
recreation, and deeds of mercy undertaken outside church walls were
also generically Christian, or even simply generically human. But
especially striking for those who could be identified as evangelicals
were the images of people praying or attending to the scriptures.
Besides photos of Bibles held, addressed, or referenced by preach¬
ers, there were several scenes of Bible classes or Bibles being tenderly
carried, including Baptist churches in Missouri and Mississippi, a
United Church of Christ congregation in Bozeman, Montana, and
the First Ukrainian Evangelical Baptist Church in Philadelphia. Bible
readers or Bible carriers were also featured at a pre-game chapel service

157
158 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

for minor league baseball players in North Carolina, a Salvation Army

relief center for earthquake victims in California, and in a small family
grouping (grandchild and grandparents) heading out the door to go to
church. The images did not by themselves explain how the Bible was
being used, but they did indicate its near omnipresence in the religious
lives of those who were photographed.
Scenes of individuals at prayer—in evangelical postures or at
evangelical churches—were even more common. In fact, it would take
a pious Walt Whitman to do justice to the multiplicity of people at
prayer as found in only this one volume:

third-grade girls clutching Bibles newly presented at a Dallas

Methodist church;
a father and a son at a Promise Keepers rally in New Orleans;
elderly black men at a Missionary Baptist church in rural Texas;
leather-clad motorcyclists at a sunrise service in Denver;
hundreds in New Mexico at a ranch retreat center sponsored by
the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.);
a knot of teenagers at the National Youth Convention of the
Church of the Nazarene;
a family before Sunday dinner in Woodstock, Georgia;
an elderly Mennonite pastor and his wife in Rowdy, Kentucky,
before dinner;
NASCAR drivers before a race at the Martinsville Speedway in
Virginia;
young people for a morning devotional at a North Texas
Methodist youth camp;
a crowd of the famous and not-so-famous pausing before work
at a Habitat for Humanity site in Atlanta;
a pastor kneeling with a couple “in crisis”;
a rodeo clown before entering the ring in Cody, Wyoming;
Sunday School students at a Presbyterian church in
Chattanooga;
parishioners at Iglesia Resurreccion y Vida Central in Grand
Rapids, Michigan;
black and white pro football players from both teams at the end
of a game;
 Evangelicalism in North America | Noll and Sanders 159

ex-gang members in Milwaukee; and

prisoners at a county jail in Fort Worth.

To the extent that such depictions were at all representative, there is a

whole lot of praying goin’ on.
What this one volume revealed about Sunday activities—and by
extension, about religious lives during the days between Sundays—
were the extraordinary variety, pervasiveness, and depth of religious
practices engaged in regularly by white North American evangelicals.
For mostly historical reasons,
the religious activities of Afri¬
can Americans differ consider¬
ably from those of their white
counterparts, even though most
black Protestants have always
maintained convictions on doc¬
trines and morals similar to the
view of white evangelicals.
Yet when one turns from
popular projects like Sunday in
America in search of academic
description or interpretation of
such practices, the scholarly cupboard—while not exactly bare—is Fig. 6.1 . This image from
Sunday in America and
hardly well stocked. As opposed to scholarly attention focused on others like it in the book
evangelical media celebrities, evangelical cultural warfare, and evan¬ show the centrality of prayer
and the Bible in the life of
gelical participation in the bruising political partisanship of recent evangelical Americans. From
decades, serious inquiry into the specifically religious practices of Sunday in America (Grand
Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan,
North American evangelicals has been relatively rare.1 1995), 13. Photo © Louis
To be sure, a few well-researched case studies have illuminated Deluca. Used by permission.

the religious lives of evangelical or quasi-evangelical groups in spe¬

cific localities.2 And several sociologists have produced careful stud¬
ies of specific dimensions of week-in, week-out religious life focused
entirely or partially on evangelicals.3 Social scientific polling has also
made available an increasing quantity of relevant statistical material,
though about such study it is important to keep in mind the sage
words of Leigh Eric Schmidt: “Most of the things that count about
Christianity cannot be counted, like the warmth or coolness of prayer,
160 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

the resonance or hollowness of scriptural words,

A Scholar's Interest in Evangelicalism the songs or silences of the saints in heaven,
I wanted to write a book about popular the presences or absences in the sacrament.”4 In
evangelicalism, to examine the ways other words, some help is at hand for examin¬
evangelical theology and morality ing the specific religious practices of evangelical
shaped individuals within the move¬ groups. It remains nonetheless only a slight exag¬
ment, how their participation in the geration to say that if formal academic studies
evangelical subculture defined who were their only resource, contemporary observers
they were and shaped the way they
would have better anthropological understanding
viewed the world. As a cultural histo¬
of cock fighting in Bali than of the hundreds of
rian, I was curious to see how evan¬
thousands of baptisms each year in congrega¬
gelical theology functioned in various
tions of the Southern Baptist Convention; or
social contests. Whatever contempo¬
closer attention to Roman Catholic street festivals
rary evangelicalism has to commend
it lies not in its media stars but in
among Italian immigrants in New York City than
the sincerity and ingenuousness of of scriptural study in the hundreds of thousands
the ordinary folk who consider them¬ of small-group neighborhood Bible studies (usu¬
selves evangelicals. ally organized by and for women) that take place
—Randall Balmer, Mine Eyes Have weekly throughout North America.5
Seen the Glory: A Journey into the In light of the scholarly investigation that still
Evangelical Subculture in America, needs to be done to document the ordinary reli¬
4th ed. (New York: Oxford University gious lives of ordinary evangelicals, this chapter
Press, 2006), 8.
can be only a preliminary probe of a few aspects
of a protean subject. Because of the numbers
and social significance of evangelical communities, this subject is as
critically important as it has been understudied. After taking up the
always daunting challenge of defining and delimiting what is meant
by “evangelical,” brief reports follow on evangelicals at prayer, evan¬
gelical public worship, and evangelical material culture. The evidence
for these subjects is spotty and conclusions only preliminary. Many
critically important aspects of evangelical religious life-like the use
of scripture, the growing turn to self-conscious “spirituality,” and the
calendrical rhythms that pervasively yet ironically mark the largely
a-liturgical evangelical communities—are omitted. But what is treated
may provide hints concerning both what does take place among evan¬
gelicals and what deserves more intensive further study.
For the purposes of the topics explored, the geography is inten¬
tionally North America, since several Canadian researchers have
 Evangelicalism in North America | Noll and Sanders 161

contributed unusual insights concerning the day-to-day unfolding of

recent evangelical history.

LOCATING EVANGELICALS
Given the increasingly slippery usage of the term, it is pertinent to
note that “evangelical” has several legitimate senses, all related to the
etymological meaning of “good news.” For Christians of many types
throughout history it has meant God’s redemption of sinners by the
work of Christ. In the Reformation the term became a rough syn¬
onym for “Protestant,” which explains why several large denomina¬
tions of European heritage like the Evangelical Lutheran Church in
America use the term. Yet the most common usage today stems from
renewal movements among British and American Protestants in the
eighteenth century whose leaders—like the founders of Methodism,
John and Charles Wesley, along with notable revivalists like George
Whitefield—sought to renew “true religion” by stressing “gospel” or
“evangelical” truths.
Evangelicals descended from these earlier movements have usually
stressed the need for religious conversion (“the new birth”). They have
held a high view of the Bibles authority. They have valued contempo¬
rary relevance over religious traditions. And they have emphasized in
their formal teachings the person of Christ, especially his redeeming
death on the cross.6 Evangelical Protestants defined by these convic¬
tions made up the largest and most influential religious groups in
the United States throughout the nineteenth century, and they were
almost as strong in Canada. In both countries large numbers con¬
tinue to the present. In keeping with the long evangelical tradition of
independent or entrepreneurial action, the most visible evangelicals
since the Second World War have been leaders of voluntary (or para-
church) agencies like the youth-oriented Campus Crusade for Christ
or the relief agency World Vision, along with publishing companies
like Christianity Today, Inc., radio-driven conglomerates like Focus
on the Family, and educational institutions like Moody Bible Institute.
Among the best known evangelical figures in recent decades have
been the evangelist Billy Graham, the psychologist and broadcaster
162 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

James Dobson, the politician and broadcaster Pat Robertson, and

Charles Colson, the one-time White House assistant to Richard Nixon
who now heads a Christian ministry to prisons.
A major U.S. poll conducted in 1996 by the Angus Reid Group
showed that adherents to Protestant denominations closely identified
with traditional evangelical distinctives—like the Southern Baptist
Convention, the Assemblies of God, the Church of the Nazarene, the
Baptist Bible Fellowship International, the Churches of Christ, and
many others—made up about 26 percent of the American popula¬
tion. These are the groups most likely to be called “evangelical,” even
though many in them do not use the term for themselves. Another
9 percent of the population were adherents of African American
Protestant churches, where many religious beliefs and practices (but
not political attitudes) are similar to those of white evangelicals. In
addition, the same poll showed that significant numbers in other
denominational families held to traditionally evangelical convictions
concerning salvation in Christ, trust in the Bible, and the need to
encourage non-Christians to become Christians—approximately half
of the adherents of the older mainline Protestant churches (Presby¬
terians, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists) and over a third of
Americas Roman Catholics. Whether defined by beliefs and practices
or by identification with conservative Protestant denominations,
evangelicals are strongest by far in the South, while weakest in New
England and the far West.7
In recent decades, American evangelicals in conservative Protes¬
tant denominations have become closely associated with politically
conservative movements. In other parts of the world and in earlier
periods of North American history, evangelicals have been more
generally nonpolitical and more widely spread across the political
spectrum. A religious stream that in the United States includes Chris¬
tian Reformed parishioners in Grand Rapids, Southern Baptists in
Birmingham, and members of the Assemblies of God in Los Angeles
(many Korean or Hispanic) cannot be summarized easily. But by
heeding patterns of historical descent and intentional conviction, it is
possible to bring at least nominal coherence to the broad and diverse
evangelical stream.
 Evangelicalism in North America I Noll and Sanders 163

PRAYER
Prayer has always been central to evangelical experience, as to the
experience of most adherents of all religions, but there has been little
scholarly attention focused on the subject.
Exceptions include a solid study by Richard The Importance of Prayer
Ostrander, who examined attempts by Amer¬ The life of prayer in a world of science
ican Protestants early in the twentieth century was indeed a difficult and important issue
to maintain religious traditions menaced by for turn-of-the-century Protestants. "Prove

an increasingly scientific modern world, and that prayer is of no avail," declared Charles

an innovative report by George Rawlyk, who Jefferson, "and you shatter the Christian
religion." The Methodist writer E. S. Smith
included consideration of prayer in extensive
agreed with Jefferson: "At no point in the
interviews of Canadian evangelicals that he
line of defense is the Christian faith more
supervised in the early 1990s.8 They are the
persistently assailed than atthis; no doctrine
sources for most of what follows.
is more vital to Christianity than that which
During the second half of the nineteenth
this point covers." American Protestants of
century, a combination of the new higher
the early twentieth century may or may not
criticism (which questioned older approaches have been interested in how many authors
to scripture) and the increasing prestige of wrote Genesis, whether humans were
natural science (which seemed to rule out descended from monkeys, or in the Social
the supernatural) took its toll on Protestant Gospel; but the serious Christian certainly
Americas traditional notions about prayer. prayed. This issue struck at the heart of the

Most directly under attack was intercessory Protestant attempt to come to grips with

prayer, which Christians of all sorts had modernity, not just among those in seminar¬

practiced through the centuries by petition¬ ies but among the rank and file as well. Yet
while historians have devoted ample atten¬
ing God with requests that the petitioners
tion to the Protestant attempts to meet the
felt could be answered with obvious results in
intellectual challenges of biblical criticism
their daily lives. This kind of prayer seemed
and Darwinian evolution, not to mention the
especially suspect when judged by a scientific
cultural challenges of a modern industrial
worldview in which it was assumed that God
society, the history of prayer in this era
did not act visibly in the world. Such attitudes remains an untold story.
did not, however, level the walls of Protestant —Rick Ostrander, The Life of Prayer in a
Christianity; among the holdouts remained World of Science: Protestants, Prayer, and
many evangelicals who clung resolutely to American Culture, 1870-1930 (New York:
one of the most personal and most prized Oxford University Press, 2000), 13.
aspects of their religion. Disputes about the
164 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

authorship of individual biblical books or adjustments in

theological understanding were one thing, but for most
evangelicals prayer was a lifeline to the divine that could
not be ceded to the modernizing instincts of an increas¬
ingly rational world.
In the decades surrounding the turn of the cen¬
tury, evangelicals found a new devotional outlet to
confirm their belief in the power of prayer. Narratives
of answered prayer seemed proof positive against scien¬
tific suspicions. As speaking in tongues functioned for
Pentecostals, so manifest answers to prayer functioned
for a larger constituency to demonstrate the personal
nearness of God. These narratives were also intended
to demonstrate for doubters that there really was a God
who truly answered prayer. They often appeared as full-
length books, many from missionaries in foreign lands
explaining how God had answered specific requests
for material needs or specific petitions for converts in
response to the preached message of Christian salva¬
tion. Two of the celebrity evangelicals figuring most
prominently in these narratives were Hudson Taylor
(1832-1905), founder of the China Inland Mission, and
George Mueller (1805-1898), an expatriate German
who had established a series of faith-based orphanages
in England. Both published their own accounts of divine
answer to prayer, and both became consistent material
for others’ commentary on prayer.
Naysayers, of course, abounded in response to the
burgeoning evangelical literature on prayer. To the
Figs. 6.2-3. Hudson Taylor scientifically minded, recitals of answered prayer testified to simple
(top), founder of the China
Inland Mission, and George coincidences, duplicity, or the triumph of hope over experience. In
Mueller (bottom) both pub¬ whatever event, direct causation could not be attributed to God,
lished popular "answered
prayer narratives" that since none of the incidents could be repeated for a scientific test.
served as an effective instru¬ The less empirically minded contended that, whatever the quantity
ment to break down the bar¬
riers of religious skepticism of answered prayer, more petitions to God (for material needs, for
and a powerful reassurance health, for repaired personal relations, for peace in the world) went
to believers in the goodness
of God. unfulfilled than were fulfilled. To the skeptics and even a few believers,
 Evangelicalism in North America I Noll and Sanders 165

the shooting of President William McKinley in 1901 offered a sober¬

ing lesson. As soon as the president was wounded by assassin Leon
Czolgosz, and during the many days he lingered thereafter, churches
and ad hoc groups gathered throughout the country to pray fervently
for the recovery of McKinley, who himself had demonstrated a sincere
personal piety. But, alas, the president did not recover.
Evangelical responses to skeptics tried to discriminate between the
genuine and the fake. According to William Patton, author of Prayer
and Its Remarkable Answers (first published in 1875, with ten reprint¬
ings soon thereafter), “multitudes say a prayer,’ who yet do no praying.
Many Christians and churches also pray so defectively ... that they do
not come within the scope of the Scriptural promises. What is their
experience worth, then, in the matter before us? It should not be said
that their prayers are not answered; but that they do not pray.”9
During the Great War and directly after—a period marked by the
fundamentalist-modernist controversy—many in the fundamentalist
camp described the promotion of vibrant prayer as a more important
activity than combat against the modernists. Reuben Torrey’s The
Power of Prayer (1924) and J. Oliver Buswell’s Problems in the Prayer
Life (1928) were two of the many books that urged believers to keep
lists of prayer requests, which would help them realize when God
answered specific prayers. The advice of Torrey, the popular evangelist
and heir to D. L. Moody, and Buswell, the president of Wheaton Col¬
lege, spoke to a practice already well entrenched, and one that contin¬
ues to this day in many evangelical circles.
Other evangelical leaders linked the practices of prayer more
directly to the eras intra-Protestant struggles over doctrine and
church practice. In 1924, James Gray, president of Moody Bible Insti¬
tute, claimed that the fundamentalists’ emphasis on prayer and their
devotion to revival made them true successors of the seventeenth-
century German pietists and eighteenth-century Methodists who
had been God’s instruments for revitalizing the dying orthodoxies of
their day.
If frequently reprinted books can be any guide to what was hap¬
pening in the homes of the book-buying public, the demonstrative
appeal to prayer rode the back of intense interest. From the 1884
printing of D. L. Moody’s Prevailing Prayer: What Hinders It? through
166 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

the early 1900s, books on personal communication with God were

well worn in the homes of conservative Protestants.
The centrality of prayer in evangelical life has continued to the
present, where again popular literature provides an indication. Evan¬
gelicals make up the bulk of those who purchase such popular books as
Too Busy Not to Pray (1988) by Bill Hybels, founding pastor of Willow
Creek Community Church in Illinois, the prototypical late twentieth-
century megachurch; Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home (1992) by
Richard J. Foster, a leading promoter of a more historical spirituality
among evangelicals; Prayer: My Souls Adventure with God (1995), an
autobiography by Robert Schuller, who presided for many years over
the Crystal Cathedral in California; The Great House of God: A Home
for Your Heart (1997), a popular exposition of the Lord’s Prayer by a
widely read pastor from Texas, Max Lucado; and Prayers from a Moth¬
ers Heart (1999) by Ruth Bell Graham, wife of the famous evangelist.
The appearance in 2000 of Bruce Wilkinsons The Prayer of Jabez:
Breaking Through to the Blessed Life soon became a sensation on the
order of Hal Lindseys The Late Great Planet Earth. Wilkinson, head of
Walk Thru the Bible Ministries of Atlanta, Georgia, drew his inspira¬
tion from a little-noticed passage in 1 Chronicles 4:9-10 (quoted here,
as in the book, from the New King James Version): “Now Jabez was
more honorable than his brothers, and his mother called his name
Jabez, saying, ‘Because I bore him in pain.’ And Jabez called on the
God of Israel saying, ‘Oh, that you would bless me indeed, and enlarge
my territory, that Your hand would be with me, and that You would
keep me from evil, that I may not cause pain!’ So God granted him
what he requested.” To Wilkinson, Jabez set out a pattern that all later
believers were intended to follow. Millions of readers from around the
world agreed.
The specific teachings in these different books, as well as the
various cautions, qualifications, and theologies found in them, differ
considerably from each other. Yet as a group, their great popularity
testifies to ongoing evangelical dedication to prayer as a foundation
for life at home, at church, and in the world.
During the early 1990s, George Rawlyk of the Queen’s Univer¬
sity in Kingston, Ontario, sought to discover more precisely what
prayer and other religious activities meant to Canadian evangelicals
 Evangelicalism in North America Noll and Sanders 167

who were willing to speak about such matters with researchers from
the Angus Reid Group. One of the most interesting results of the
investigation that Rawlyk supervised was the discovery that these
evangelicals reported a much more consistent practice of prayer than
they did the reading of scripture. Where Canadians in general were
more than three times as likely to pray daily as to
read the Bible or other devotional material daily
Evangelical Canadians
(29 percent to 8 percent), Canadian evangeli¬
Over three times as many Canadians
cals, with much higher general levels of religious pray daily (29 per cent) as read their
practice, were more than twice as likely to pray Bibles or other religious material
daily (87 percent to 42 percent). Of those who daily (8 per cent). And one half of all
reported praying every day, about a fifth said they Canadians (49 per cent) believe that
did so for at least an hour, another fifth twenty "God always answers my prayers,
to fifty minutes, and the rest lesser amounts. The even if the answer is no."... In fact,

overwhelming majority of Canadian evangelicals over twice as many evangelicals pray

reported that they directed their prayers to “God daily than those who read the Bible
daily. As has been pointed out, 42 per
the Father” (90 percent). In a conviction closely
cent of the evangelical sample read
related to prayer, 87 percent reported that they
the Bible daily; 87 per cent, on the
believed in divine healing, with half of that num¬
other hand, pray daily—78 per cent
ber reporting that they knew someone personally
mainline Protestants, 87 per cent of
who had been healed as a result of prayer.10
the Roman Catholics, and 92 per cent
While the numbers that Rawlyk discovered of conservative Christians.
indicated the general importance of prayer to —George A. Rawlyk, Is Jesus Your
evangelicals, these numbers could not reveal Personal Saviour? In Search of
the content, the intentions, or the meaning of Canadian Evangelicalism in the 1990s
the prayers. For that purpose Rawlyk looked to (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University
extended interviews, which followed up the poll¬ Press, 1996), 127.

ing. He found that men had greater difficulty

articulating how and why they prayed, and what prayer meant, than
did women. Men and women alike usually spoke of prayer as speaking
informally with God. Some prayed in order to talk with God about
what had happened during the day, while others stressed the peace
of mind brought by the practice. One ordained minister said that he
prayed to find the will of God, but also conceded that this search was
often frustrating.
Most of the women interviewed spoke of prayer as simply talking
to God, something they did informally and throughout the day. More
168 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

specifically, several reported that prayer was like an ongoing dialogue

with someone who was both understanding and caring toward them
personally. The women also reported that prayer was a peaceful or
relaxing activity that helped them to unwind or “get rid of the day’s
pressure.” Many women stressed the need to pray throughout the day,
being in constant communion with the Most High about the events
of their daily lives, however trivial. Many of these same women also
valued praying with others, which made them feel connected not only
to God but to a broader church community as well.
Not surprisingly, for both men and women a significant factor in
church adherence was the importance of corporate prayer. Rawlyk
summarized that “feeling comfortable in a specific church seems to be
more important than denominational loyalty,” and also that the denom¬
inations that had successfully integrated small-group prayer into their
church polity had been better able to retain their members.11
From the general study of Ostrander at the beginning of the twen¬
tieth century and the specific interviews of Rawlyk toward the end, it
may be concluded that for evangelicals prayer remains one of the most
personal aspects of Christian faith. Prayer connects believers to both
God and the larger Christian community. It serves as protection for
their beliefs and as an assurance of God’s power in this world, but even
more as a means of fostering identity and purpose. Although practices
of prayer and the contents of prayer vary widely, and although there is
no general evangelical consensus on what exactly occurs in prayer or
on the best ways to pursue prayer, evangelicals devoutly believe that
God hears prayers, that praying is essential to the Christian life, and
that prayer has the ability to effect significant change in this world. In
these conclusions evangelicals clearly resemble the adherents of other
Christian traditions. If they are distinctive, it is probably in the infor¬
mality, the individuality, and the demonstrative reassurances they find
in prayer.

PUBLIC PRAISE
If evangelical attitudes to prayer and their praying practices have
remained relatively constant, it is different with evangelical public
worship, where marked changes in recent decades have dramatically
 Evangelicalism in North America | Noll and Sanders 169

altered Sunday religious observance and particularly the sound of

these services. Since the 1960s, evangelicals in North America, along
with the Catholic Church and almost all mainline Protestant denomi¬
nations, have witnessed significant movements of spiritual renewal
that directly affect the shape of public worship. For many of the older
denominations—as also for younger bodies, independent congrega¬
tions, and the new megachurches—this development has led to fresh
thought about the weekly worship service. The sermon, which remains
a central feature of almost all Protestant worship, remains seriously
understudied. Over the last fifty years sermons in general have prob¬
ably become less formal in structure, less theological in content, more
therapeutic in orientation, and more narrative in structure—though
not necessarily shorter. The role of the Bible for sermons has doubtless
changed, being used more for narrative and therapeutic purposes (but
not being replaced by other authorities). Yet until further study of ser¬
mons is carried out, such conclusions must remain only tentative.12
By contrast, serious study, as well as great conflict, abounds con¬
cerning the great changes that have occurred in the musical life of
congregations.13 Most of the denominations issued new hymnbooks
in the last thirty years, and there have been serious efforts at liturgical
reform guided by more thorough study of the Christian past. Yet far
and away the most dramatic changes in regular worship services have
taken place in the evangelical churches in which—a major surprise
when considering earlier antagonisms—styles of worship originat¬
ing among Pentecostals and charismatics have become increasingly
influential.
As described by Larry Eskridge of Wheaton Colleges Institute
for the Study of American evangelicals, standard video footage of
generic evangelical congregations, of megachurches, or of worship
in the South and Sunbelt (which boast the greatest concentration of
identifiable evangelicals) now regularly depicts about the same thing:
“obligatory shots of middle-class worshipers, usually white, in cor¬
porate-looking auditoriums or sanctuaries, swaying to the electrified
music of praise bands,’ their eyes closed, their enraptured faces tilted
heaven-ward, a hand (or hands) raised to the sky.”14 Behind such
often-repeated images lies a lengthy evangelical tradition of populist
worship innovation, but also a number of influential shifts since the
Second World War.
170 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

The trajectory of evangelical worship habits has been determined

by the populism of evangelical history. Evangelicals have always been
about more than revivalism, but revival has nonetheless exerted a
determining influence, especially as it points evangelicals toward
emotional reassurance for those in the churches and effective appeal
to those outside. For hymnody and the more general use of music,
innovation aimed at capturing the attention of contemporary audi¬
ences has always been the key.15
This distinctly evangelical approach to public worship began in
the early decades of the eighteenth century when the English Congre-
gationalist hymn writer, Isaac Watts, took the daring step of producing
hymns that went beyond the paraphrasing of psalms, which had long
been the universal practice of English-speaking Protestant churches.
Although Watts’s hymns soon were transformed into classic exemplars
themselves, they represented in their own day exciting and controver¬
sial new music, including popular examples like “Come, ye that love
the Lord, / And let our joys be known”; “Jesus shall reign wher-eer the
sun/Does his successive journeys run”; and “Joy to the world! the
Lord is come.”
Hard on the heels of Watts, and as a driving engine of evangeli¬
cal spiritual revival more generally, came the even more innovative
hymns of Charles Wesley and a host of contemporaries who in the
mid-eighteenth century self-consciously stressed the potential for per¬
sonal engagement. So it was that Methodist adherents sang with fer¬
vor, hymns like Wesley s “Jesus, lover of my soul, / Let me to thy bosom
fly”; “A charge to keep I have, / A God to glorify”; and “And can it be
that I should gain / An interest in the Saviors blood?” To the audac¬
ity of writing hymns not taken directly from the scripture, Wesley
and his hymn-writing peers added meters that deviated exuberantly
from the common, long, and short that had monopolized almost all
public singing in British churches. To their opponents, such hymns
meant the sacrilegious breach of honored church traditions, but to the
evangelicals they spoke of a revivified faith adapted to the interests of
ordinary men and women.
Eager evangelical audiences took up the hymns of Watts, Wesley,
and other eighteenth-century evangelical worthies like John Newton,
William Cowper, Augustus Toplady, and William Williams so enthu-
 Evangelicalism in North America | Noll and Sanders 171

siastically that this type of church music soon became canonical. The
sustained popularity of the eighteenth-century hymns led to the ironic
situation in which later generations of evangelical innovators had to
overcome charges that their new works were a sacrilegious breach of
honored church tradition.
But when innovators in the second half of the nineteenth century
sought ways to reach out to urban dwellers who had left behind the
small cities and rural regions where eighteenth-century evangelical¬
ism had taken firmest root, they added a new kind of singing that
once again featured the evangelical penchant for musical innovation.
This time it was the gospel song—catchy, direct, sometimes sentimen¬
tal, with lively choruses repeated after each verse—that once again
brought the evangelical message of salvation into self-consciously
contemporary churches for self-consciously deliberate purposes of
outreach.16
Celebrity preachers with their equally celebrated song leaders, like
the team of D. L. Moody and Ira Sankey in the United States and Brit¬
ain, or Hugh Crossley and John Hunter in Canada, pushed past evan¬
gelical traditions in order to “rescue the perishing” or “throw out the
lifeline,” as the new songs put it. In Canada, the Methodist itinerants
Crossley and Hunter developed the musical revival service into an
immensely popular form of public entertainment as well as a greatly
effective evangelistic tool. With their carefully planned multiweek
services, the engaging monologues of Hunter, and the moving songs
of Crossley (like “My Mothers Prayer” and “Papa, Come This Way”),
this Canadian team became a mainstay of local spiritual renewal, but
also a prod for reforming the regular worship service once they had
left town.17
The same thing occurred wherever Moody and Sankey traveled or
were publicized. Moody’s down-home, lay-oriented preaching softened
the gospel message and made it more appealing to the families and sin¬
gle individuals flooding into the hyper-busy cities of the industrial age.
Sankey s Gospel Hymns and Sacred Songs, which appeared as a series
beginning in 1875 and became very popular, retained some older stan¬
dards (often abridged and with spruced up music) but also included
a great number of new songs. Chief among the writers of these new
pieces was the blind hymn writer Fanny Crosby. Her lyrics—like “Tell
 172 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

me the story of Jesus, / Write on my heart every word” and “To God
be the glory, great things He hath done, / So loved He the world that
He gave us His Son”—represented a simpler, more direct, and more
easily remembered form of church music that came to define much of
evangelicalism as surely as had
the work of Watts and Wesley
in the previous century.18 San¬
key s own work at the piano,
and with other keyboard
instruments, also struck out
toward more expressive and
singable music that came closer
to the tunes of contemporary
popular culture. (Neither then
nor later did evangelicals ever
become entirely comfortable
with organs and organ music,
Fig. 6.4. Evangelical revival for they were associated with high-church and formal church tradi¬
meetings of the late nine¬
teenth and early twentieth tions that evangelicals associated with spiritual torpor.)
centuries were marked by Outside the auditoriums where popular evangelists like Crossley-
preacher/song-leader pairs.
The best-known duo included Hunter and Moody-Sankey did their work, yet another form of musical
the famed evangelist
innovation was bursting onto the evangelical world. This contribution
D. L. Moody (left) and the
equally celebrated hymn came from the Salvation Army, which after it “opened fire” in Canada
writer and song-leader Ira
and the United States in the early 1880s, was rapidly established as a
Sankey (right). Image ©
Corbis. Used by permission. mainstay of urban revivalism and urban social service.19 From its ear¬
liest days under William Booth in what he called “darkest England,”
the public trademark of the Salvation Army had been the brass band
on parade, in teeming public spaces, on stage for entertainment—in
short, wherever it could be heard. The musical quality of Salvation¬
ist bands was often remarkably high, but they were at first regarded
almost universally as a disruptive force. When, however, their music,
and the well-rounded Christian action that accompanied it, began to
draw crowds, change lives, and establish successful institutions, other
evangelicals unbent enough to add some of the Army’s musical verve
to their own worship services.
At the start of the twentieth century, evangelical public praise rep¬
resented a mixture of musical styles and preferences. Layers of Watts,
 Evangelicalism in North America I Noll and Sanders 173

Wesley, Sankey, and the Salvation Army mingled in different propor¬

tions throughout North America. In the American South, these same
tributaries were joined by regional influences, especially derived from
shape-note singing, to create a distinctive worship sound. That sound
was not well known outside of its region, but it would eventually con¬
tribute a great deal to the gospel music in white and black styles that
became so popular in the last decades of the twentieth century.20
After World War II, musical stasis reigned in many evangelical
churches, but it did not survive for long. At least four influences
were critical in prompting change. The first, television, has not been
systematically studied for its effects on week-to-week American
religious life. Nonetheless, its presence by the late 1950s in most
American homes, of whatever religion or none, meant that a power¬
ful medium for shaping musical taste would work its influence in the
churches as throughout all of the culture. For evangelical churches,
television probably had much to do with rising expectations about
professional musical quality, heightened self-consciousness in musi¬
cians’ self-presentation, increasing tolerance for stronger rhythms,
lowered levels of intellectual content, and intuitive assumptions
about immediate singable appeal. Whatever the exact influence
exerted by television, attendance by the 1990s at almost any evangeli¬
cal church of any kind anywhere in North America would testify to
the pervasive influence of this new medium.
Second, and better documented, are the explicit efforts by some
leading evangelicals to attract younger people through music. His¬
torian Thomas Bergler has shown, for example, how the Youth for
Christ movement systematically and deliberately innovated in making
its music as enticing as it could, yet without crossing the increasingly
thin barrier between the pious and the worldly.21 Youth for Christ,
which began only in the last years of World War II, was active in
thousands of localities by the early 1950s. Its main outreach was the
Saturday night rally, in which lively music of all sorts—from near
hip-hop to tuneful ballads to imitation Big Band—reached out, and
with considerable effect, to members of the rising generation. Older
evangelicals worried whether such innovation was appropriate, while
few in the younger generation or those trying to appeal to them paid
much attention.
174 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

A third factor in the renovation of contemporary evangelical

music was the mainstreaming of Pentecostal influences. In the early
decades of the twentieth century, when Pentecostal churches were
multiplying rapidly, many evangelicals looked upon their special
concentration on the work of the Holy Spirit as disturbing, fanatical,
or worse. Over time, however, Pentecostal themes and Pentecostal
personalities came closer and closer to the mainstream, with partici¬
pation by leaders of the Assemblies of God at the formation of the
National Association of Evangelicals in 1942 as a public mark of that
process.
Pentecostal worship had always represented an analogue to the
Pentecostal emphasis on healing and the gift of tongues, which is
to say exuberant, spontaneous, and subjective. In addition, during
the early decades of the movement a great quantity of new hymns
appeared as expression of the heightened emotions resulting from
direct contact with the Spirit. Pentecostal praise was marked by much
more than just new words, however, for it also innovated ceaselessly
with diverse musical expressions, including instrumentation from
accordions, fiddles, banjos, and even (in a momentous development
for evangelicalism) drums. Except for African American churches,
rhythm in historical evangelicalism had always meant a down-beat on
the first beat, never involved syncopation, and eschewed percussion
as literally of the devil. But the Pentecostal movement was strongly
marked by southern and African American origins; its lay leadership
took orders from no highbrows; its great desire to palpably demon¬
strate the power of the gospel translated readily into musical styles
that engaged body as well as mind, active emotion as well as passive
sentiment. Although it took awhile for outside observers to notice the
connections, the popularity of stars like Mahalia Jackson (with South¬
ern Baptist and Sanctified Holiness roots) and Elvis Presley (raised in
the Assemblies of God and a frequent attender at Sunday night gospel
sings in Memphis) represented a forecast of more general musical
trends in the evangelical churches as well as in American society as
a whole.
Pentecostal patterns of worship and religious practice began to
have a broader influence on the wider religious world when a pair of
developments occurred after World War II. First was the rise in public
 Evangelicalism in North America | Noll and Sanders 175

meetings for healing. Evangelists William Branham (1909-1965) and

Oral Roberts (b. 1918) were the figures best known in that “healing
revival, but there were many others. These preachers, all from Pente¬
costal backgrounds, fanned out over especially the South, Southwest,
and West to promote the healing of physical ills by a special work of
the Holy Spirit.22
The second development, and the one that did the most to bridge
the gap with evangelical congregations distant from Pentecostalism
(or even hostile to it) was the charismatic movement that emerged
in the late 1950s. This movement promoted some of the emphases of
classical Pentecostalism but in typical American fashion: by present¬
ing a kind of spiritual smorgasbord to sample as individuals chose.
These emphases included a stress on personal conversion, physical
healing, speaking in tongues, participation in small-group fellow¬
ships, and—above all—a profusion of freshly written, catchy, and very
singable songs. Charismatic (in the sense of personal magnetism)
leaders always played a major role in the charismatic movement. Some
of those leaders, like Jack Hayford, minister of a Four Square Gospel
Church in California, contributed significantly to the new music with
songs like “Majesty” (“Majesty, worship His Majesty / Unto Jesus, be
all glory, honor, and praise”). Charismatic renewal provided a bridge
of common associations, songs, and attitudes between Pentecostals
and non-Pentecostals. After the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965)
it performed the same function in bridging the even broader historical
divide between Catholics and Protestants.
The fourth important contributor to newer evangelical worship at
the end of the twentieth century was the Jesus Movement, which took
off in the mid-1960s and seemed to flame out after barely a decade.
The Jesus Movement, strong at first on the West Coast but then
broadening out to touch virtually all parts of the United States and
many in Canada, represented old wine in new wineskins. Its youthful
leaders stressed the need for a personal experience with Christ (the
new birth), promoted disciplined study of scripture (but with little
concern for what academics said about the Bible), stoutly resisted the
loosening of morals (in some cases after personal experimentation),
and displayed the single-minded zeal that marked leaders of earlier
evangelical revivals. At the same time, the Jesus Movement did not
176 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

lead to the traditional evangelical division between church and world.

It was a movement that fully engaged popular culture, was fully a part
of the postwar recognition of youth and young adulthood as inde¬
pendent stages of life, and simply took for granted Christian use of
much in popular culture that earlier generations of evangelicals had
disavowed.
Above all, the Jesus People embraced modern musical idioms—at
first the gentler sides of folk and jazz, but then increasingly the louder
and amplified rhythms of rock as well. Larry Eskridge has described
the music that came out of the Jesus Movement to influence the
broader subculture as “equal parts folk, pop and light rock—simple
songs and choruses that, in the recollection of one early musician ...,
sang themselves.’”23 Significantly, many of the new tunes were written
in order to sing small portions of scripture, often from the King James
Version.
For American evangelicals, the Jesus People were strategic bro¬
kers between age and youth, and also between churchly culture and
American culture. Their ability to set strict standards in matters of
doctrine and practice while opening themselves to postwar popular
culture led the way for many others. The Jesus Movement was gone
as a recognizable organism by the late 1970s, but the youth-oriented
attitudes, the reliance on pop culture, and a well-stocked repertoire of
new tunes remained.
Several important associations of churches drew directly on the
emphases of the movement, including a network of Calvary Chapels
under the leadership of Chuck Smith. In 1965, Smith became the
minister of a small independent congregation in Costa Mesa, Califor¬
nia, and immediately opened the church door to “hippies” and other
countercultural folk. Through a mix of informality, soft rock music,
biblical exposition, and the standard charismatic options, Calvary
Chapel took off and within a generation had spawned a network of
nearly a thousand other chapels around the world.
A similar story describes the Association of Vineyard Churches,
which was connected to Smiths Calvary Chapel in its early days. Under
the leadership of John Wirnber, this California-based evangelical
movement stressed divine healing and promoted nontraditional forms
of worship. Its loose-leaf collections of new songs were used by many
 Evangelicalism in North America | Noll and Sanders 177

churches far beyond its own

movement and served as
Music and the Jesus Movement
inspiration for similar new Given the centrality of music to the Jesus movement, its rise
ventures by even more. The came at an opportune time in terms of the musical trajectory of
Vineyard has grown to hun¬ American evangelicalism as more upbeat, youth-friendly musi¬
dreds of congregations with cal forms began to make some inroads into the subculture dur¬
hundreds of thousands of ing the '60s. However, it would be the Jesus People themselves

members and with congre¬ who drew naturally upon the rock and folk-oriented musical

gations in many countries.24 forms of popular culture to create their own body of "Jesus

The great changes in Music" to enhance worship, to use as an evangelistic tool, and
to serve as a form of sanctified musical entertainment. Overall,
evangelical church music
this sanctified version of rock music provided a common ground
that have accelerated since
within the movement and a potential bridge between the Jesus
the 1960s rested securely on
People and their peers in "the world." As the movement grew
long-standing traditions of
across the country and found itself on a more solid footing, it
popular innovation but were
promoted the growth of not only more musicians playing for a
driven especially by televi¬ growing audience, but also an expanding infrastructure of local
sion, evangelical willingness venues, home-grown promoters, and a rough-hewn recording
to embrace popular youth and distribution "industry" that in its early days placed more
culture, the Pentecostal and emphasis on evangelism and discipleship than on marketing
charismatic movements, and and sales.

the Jesus People. Under these Soon, however, the marketing potential of the new "Jesus

influences church musicians Generation" began to swing the dynamics of the Jesus Music

by the 1980s were exploit¬ away from its informal, countercultural roots toward the trap¬
pings and business practices of the mainstream music and
ing a full range of pop, folk,
entertainment industries. While still but a shadow of big-time
and even rock styles as set¬
rock 'n' roll, by the mid-'70s recording contracts, improved pro¬
tings for this new wave of
duction values, better distribution and packaging, large Jesus
song. Without knowing yet
Music festivals, and a tiny—but increasing—amount of radio
what will survive and what
airplay all pointed to a growing professionalism and corporate
will simply fade from sight, control over what had once been a casual, homegrown element
the following are almost ran¬ of "Jesus Freak" life. "Jesus Music" provided the foundations
dom example of such lyrics: for a significant new musical presence within evangelicalism
“I love you, Lord / and I lift and the lynchpin for the emerging and future evangelical youth
my voice / to worship You / o cultures: the "Contemporary Christian Music" industry.

my soul, rejoice”; “Hosanna, —Larry Eskridge, "God's Forever Family:

Hosanna, Hosanna in the The Jesus People Movement in America, 1966-1977"

highest! Hosanna, Hosanna, (Ph.D. diss., Stirling University, Scotland, 2005), 254-55.

Hosanna in the highest! Lord

178 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

we lift up your name with hearts full of praise. Be exalted O Lord my

God! Hosanna in the highest!”; “Holy fire, living flame are you./Our
desire is to honor you.”
The increasingly standard practice of singing with a combo made
up of guitar, drums, and synthesizer has made the organ an anach¬
ronistic relic in many Protestant and some Catholic churches. Songs
projected onto a screen have replaced the hymnbook in many places.
The same set of religious forces has provided the foundation for a
multimillion dollar industry of contemporary Christian music that
has made stars out of individuals like Amy Grant and groups like
D. C. Talk, P.O.D., and Switchfoot.
The proliferation of megachurches since the 1980s is not uncon¬
nected to this chapter of musical history. These churches, defined by
an ability to maintain a regular weekly attendance of two thousand
or more, now exist in every state and province. Megachurches are
Fig. 6.5. In many regards the
Willow Creek Community
spiritual shopping malls designed intentionally to provide religious
Church of South Barrington, resources for people caught in the tense circumstances of modern life.
Illinois, is the prototypical
model of the modern North The model for such congregations is the Willow Creek Community
American megachurch. Church in South Barrington, Illinois. It began in 1975 with services
These churches have contrib¬
uted to popularizing the new in a rented movie theater as an outreach for youth and their parents.
modes of praise and worship The mission of its leaders, including founding pastor Bill Hybels,
music in North America
during the last quarter of the is explained on its webpage: “to build a church that would speak
twentieth century. Photo © the language of our modern culture and encourage non-believers
John Gress/Reuters/Corbis.
Used by permission. to investigate Christianity at their own pace, free from the trad¬
itional trappings of reli¬
gion that tend to chase
them away.”25 From
the start Willow Creek
avoided churchy lan¬
guage and sought pro¬
fessional standards. Also
from the start, upbeat
music, newly written
songs, and professional-
level musical talent were
central in communicat¬
ing its message. Within
 Evangelicalism in North America I Noll and Sanders 179

a year weekly attendance was over a thousand, and by the mid-1990s

as many as fifteen thousand were attending weekend services on its
127-acre campus in Chicago’s northwest suburbs.26 The sound that
comes from such megachurches—usually meeting in multiple services
on Saturday nights and Sunday mornings—is no longer Watts, Wes¬
ley, and Sankey set to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tunes. It is
rather music expressing nearly the full range of styles from contempo¬
rary popular American culture.
Critics of the charismatic movement, the megachurches, and
other Protestant adaptations to modern sensibilities are not shy about
expressing their disapproval of the new music.27 They charge that
charismatic worship focuses on the self and not on God. They see the
megachurches as catering to the transitory felt-needs of a pleasure-
driven population. They hold that the new songs obscure the realities
of human sinfulness and the holiness of God, while pampering the
fragile postmodern self, and so make it impossible to grasp the true
character of divine grace.
Contemporary debates over modern innovations in evangeli¬
cal song resemble earlier controversies between Methodists and the
traditional churches of the eighteenth century, or Pentecostals and
their critics early in the twentieth century. The debates are important
because they address the twin, but sometimes competing, strengths
of North American evangelical Christianity. These strengths are its
connection to the historic Christian faith and its impulse to adjust
the faith in order to gain a broad hearing among the populace at
large.
The future of weekly worship certainly hinges on what happens in
the volatile evangelical dance with American popular culture. It may
also hinge even more on what happens in the rest of the world. The
fastest growing segments of evangelical or evangelical-like Christian¬
ity are now found in sub-Saharan Africa, China, Korea, the Pacific
Islands, and Latin America. Where once British and North American
evangelicals dictated styles of worship to a missionary world, now
majority-world evangelicals are nearly at a place to exert a counter¬
vailing influence on the former evangelical homelands. If that out¬
come actually occurs, it will doubtless affect the sound (and more) of
North American worship.
180 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

MATERIAL CULTURE
Whatever influence the majority world may come to exert, it is likely
that the material culture of North American evangelicals, which has
come to mirror the material values of the American host culture, will
remain distinctive. Throughout the twentieth century, commercial¬
ization reached unprecedented heights in North America generally,
while at the same time commercial promotion of religiously oriented
products became commonplace in evangelical circles. This commer¬
cialization exploded during the last quarter of the century. By the late
1970s stores specializing in the sale of Christian merchandise were
growing at nearly double the national retail average.28 By the 1990s
Christian retailing amounted to a $3 billion annual enterprise. As with
other parts of the American economy, when sales reach such figures,
it inevitably follows that the mom and pop stores would be squeezed
out by national retail chains. This well-known American process has
now witnessed the rise of the Christian megastore, with one chain
boasting average retail space of thirty thousand square feet per out¬
let.29 In fact, the market for Christian goods and objects has become
so lucrative that many nonreligious retailers now routinely stock
Christian-designated items in order to meet the demand.
Given traditional Protestant warnings about the dangers of trust¬
ing in money, the temptations of idolatry, and the allure of “the world,”
it may seem strange that American evangelicals have created such a
booming industry at the start of the twenty-first century. Historically,
evangelicals rained criticism on their Catholic contemporaries for
what they perceived as Catholic susceptibility to material and idola¬
trous temptations. Yet now they themselves are taking part.
Persuasive explanations for this apparent anomaly have been
provided in a wide-ranging book by historian Colleen McDannell. Its
title, Material Christianity, points to her thesis that American Chris¬
tian believers of all sorts have regularly expressed a desire to “see, hear
and touch God”30 by incorporating religious objects into their daily
lives and the physical landscape of those lives. Her examination of
what evangelicals have actually done, as well as what they have said,
allows her to demonstrate that Protestant evangelicals have never been
as successful at dividing the sacred from the profane as their speech
 Evangelicalism in North America I Noll and Sanders 181

might indicate. Instead, for many evangelicals the line between the
two has always been blurry, and for some it has now passed away
entirely. As suggested by McDannells provocative book, full evan¬
gelical engagement in the manufacture, merchandising, and display
of material objects can best be understood as a
search for identity. By examining the terrain of
what has become the burgeoning material culture
Religious Belief and the Concrete
American Christians ... want to see,
of a burgeoning religious subculture, it is possible
hear and touch God. It is not enough
to see more clearly how evangelical religious life
for Christians to go to church, lead a
has come to interact with the national material
righteous life and hope for an eventual
culture.
place in heaven. People build religion
Evangelicals have embraced a culture of reli¬ into the landscape, they make and buy
gious objects primarily for self-identification and pious images for their homes, and they
for demonstrating to others what the Christian wear special reminders of their faith
faith means to them. These overarching purposes next to their bodies. Religion is more
have been manifest in different ways. Its devel¬ than a type of knowledge learned
opment is perhaps most obvious in the Jesus through reading holy books and lis¬
Movement, whose effects in shaping evangelical tening to holy men.... Throughout

worship were matched by effects in influencing American history, Christians have

explored the meaning of the divine,
evangelical materiality. In striking measure, the
the nature of death, the power of heal¬
Jesus People separated themselves from popular
ing, and the experience of the body
American life even as they embraced it fully. Jesus
by interacting with a created world of
People wanted it known that they had found
images and shapes.
something more life-fulfilling than sex, drugs, and
—Colleen McDannell, Material
rock ’n roll, but they used the paraphernalia that Christianity: Religion and Popular
had arisen around sex, drugs, and rock ’n roll to Culture in America (New Haven: Yale
make that statement. Thus, emblazoned T-shirts, University Press, 1995), 1.
bumper stickers, and buttons with dayglow Chris¬
tian symbols used the cultural trappings of the counterculture to show
the counterculture a better way. Among the most popular icons were a
hand pointing toward heaven accompanied with the words “one way”
or “Jesus is the one way”; a smiley face with the slogan, “Smile. God
loves you!”; and the sketch of a fish (in reprise of an ancient Christian
symbol) with the name Jesus lettered on the inside.
During the 1980s and 1990s, organization replaced anarchy in the
merchandising and display of Jesus objects. Huge retailing conferences
like the annual convention of the Christian Booksellers Association
182 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

and, later, the International Christian Retail Show, allowed hundreds

of vendors to exhibit their wares in spacious convention centers. In
the competition that resulted, products became more elaborate, and
more costly, and also turned from the slogans of the Jesus People to
knockoffs of mainstream merchandising giants like Nike, Pepsi, Ford,
and Reebok.
The growth of Christian retail in the 1990s produced a variety
of predictable responses. When the cheap, brightly colored bumper
stickers of the ’70s gave way to more elaborate and professional prod¬
ucts, one of the favorites of baby boomer evangelicals was the fish
(or ichthus, after the symbol in the ancient Roman catacombs) with
Jesus’ name etched on the inside. This emblem became so widespread
that other wily merchandisers provided their own parody—a footed
fish with “Darwin” etched inside. Nothing daunted, Christian retail¬
ers responded with a new larger ichthus designated “Truth” that was
shown swallowing the Darwin creature—and all for display on the
back of a car, van, or truck.
An even more widely noticed evangelical icon in the 1990s was
the WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?) bracelet. This phrase had been
popularized originally in a novel from 1897, In His Steps, by a Social
Gospel minister, Charles Sheldon. The book described the transfor¬
mation of a city whose church people made WWJD their guide for
daily life. A century later, bracelets with these letters were being sold
in both Christian and secular outlets and were being worn by hun¬
dreds of thousands of evangelical young people and adults. Among
the many parodies that inevitably followed, “We Want Jack Daniels”
and “What Would Elvis Do?” were among the least vulgar. Parody
Fig. 6.6. The popular
WWJD? (What Would Jesus grew serious when environmentalists, both religious and secular,
Do?) bracelet. Photo © Scott
asked “What Would Jesus Drive?” in an effort to raise consciousness
Speakes/Corbis. Used by
permission. about the responsible use of natural resources.
By the turn of the millennium, religious retailers
were moving in many directions. Although Christian
takeoffs of commercially popular products remained
in vogue, increasing numbers of Christian-defined
companies moved beyond sloganed T-shirts into
the production of complete product lines. Thus,
for evangelicals who choose this way of proclaim-
 Evangelicalism in North America I Noll and Sanders 183

ing their identity, there now exist blazers, hoodies,

skirts, pants, jackets, capris, beanies, wrist wear,
socks, belts, belt buckles, hats, wallets, messenger
bags, laptop cases, purses, necklaces, rings, earrings
and toe rings—all from Christian retailers and bear¬
ing some form of Christian identifying symbol.
The growth of an evangelical fashion industry
has been greatly stimulated by the internet. Hun¬
dreds of Christian retailers now push such products
online, where enterprising shoppers can even cre¬
ate their own Christian gear. If accumulating the
accoutrements of a distinctive lifestyle has become
American big business in general, it is also increas¬
ingly common for younger evangelicals to do the
same. Whether it is skateboarding or snowboarding,
alternative rock or punk rock, merchandise is avail¬
able that ostensibly allows evangelical consumers to
be both in the world but not of it. Sales of such items
are often keyed to Christian rock festivals, where Christian vendors Fig. 6.7. Christian retailers
have moved beyond parody-
sell Christian clothing, Christian music, Christian accessories, even
logo T-shirts to creating their
Christian tattoos that let consumers impress a Christian identity on own fashion lines that are
more in touch with modern
the personalities they are creating.
trends. Companies such as
Christian biker clubs, primarily on the West Coast, carry the C28 (one of whose hoodies
is pictured here) have both
process of self-identification a step further. Members in dozens of
major shopping mall and
such clubs display coordinated belt buckles, leather jackets, and vests online retail outlets where
they sell all sorts of
with Christian messages. They ride together, organize prayer and Christian-themed gear
study groups, and share the gospel at Sturgis. One Pentecostal-specific such as wristbands and
wristcuffs, sandals and
group is called the “Azusa Street Riders.” Much more widespread are sunglasses, and belt buckles
marketing efforts connected with the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and button-downs. Photo
courtesy of C28.com.
which promotes Christian-logoed water bottles, lacrosse helmets, golf
balls, sports bags, and so forth.
As McDannell shows convincingly, the recent reach of evangelical
merchandising into the marketplace represents not so much a new
development as an expansion of material culture from private spheres
to the public. Since the early to mid-nineteenth century, the desire to
create a distinctly Christian home has prompted especially evangeli¬
cal women to unusual efforts at decoration.31 Needlework with Bible
184 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

verses or Christian slogans began even

earlier; in the first years of the twenti¬
eth century that particular practice was
successfully promoted to a wide public
by the Gospel Trumpet Company. The
display of religious books, hymnals, and
especially the family Bible is also a prac¬
tice with roots deep in the nineteenth
century.32 More recent are religious
figurines available from the Precious
Moments collection.
Fig. 6.8. Christian rock In what looks like a sharp break from former anti-Catholic ani¬
festivals such as this one
mus, evangelical homes by the second half of the twentieth century
are hubs for evangelical
material culture. Beyond the were also increasingly likely to display a decorative cross, particularly
music, concert goers can
browse dozens of vendors
one affixed to the wall. Although these objects are available singly, or
selling Christian apparel, as individual receptacles for candles, others come in sets for cluster¬
snowboards, tattoos, and
skateboards. Some ventures
ing. The decorative cross has also sparked a collecting hobby, espe¬
even have art galleries and cially among travelers who return from trips with new examples for
poetry readings or other
outlets for evangelical ex¬ their collections. So popular has the business in decorative crosses
pressions of the arts. Photo: become that they are now sold in major home retailers like Pier One
Scott Stahnke.
Imports or Kirkland’s as well as in stores specializing in Christian
merchandise.
For evangelicals, like adherents of almost all other religions, phys¬
ical objects also serve as agents of memory and memorial. Decorative
crosses, for instance, are often just as much a way of remembering a
significant journey to Mexico, Ireland, or Spain as they are of evoking
a biblical image. (The fact that evangelical crosses are not crucifixes—
they are invariably bare—helps explain their plastic associations.)
Evangelicals, again in common with humanity in general, collect
objects that remind them of faith and family. Although the family
piano, or even family organ, is now less common in an age of indi¬
vidualized interior space than it was when families gathered in parlors
or living rooms, clusters of photos, crosses, or hymnals on a piano
have long served to connect present generations to those gone before.
Similarly, popular pictures of Jesus, preeminently Warner Sallman’s
Head of Christ (see p. 7), function both as contemporary reassurance
and links to a past when the portrait was also displayed.33
 Evangelicalism in North America I Noll and Sanders 185

Religious objects associated with

special events such as weddings, funer¬
als, or the birth of children also abound
in evangelical homes. These memen¬
tos not only occupy a special place in
memory but also work to strengthen
the Christian community. Gift-giving
supports that community linkage, as it
also stimulates merchandising, in the
form of a religious journal for graduates,
a devotional book for Christmas, a pic¬
ture frame for baby showers, or a family
Bible for weddings.
A special item that can be rescued
from the realm of mere kitsch by fol¬
lowing McDannell’s approach is the
refrigerator magnet. When these ubiq¬
uitous icons of contemporary Ameri¬
can life display religious mottoes or
inspirational messages, they reinforce
at a persistent daily level both faith and
community. Among evangelicals a distinctive kind of magnet is the Fig. 6.9. Decorative crosses
prayer reminder for foreign missionaries. Such magnets may feature adorn the walls of many
evangelical homes. The
a portrait of the missionary family, the name of the country or region crosses can be bought at
in which they are serving, and perhaps a biblical reference spelling out most major home furnish¬
ing stores as well as local
ideals of the mission. The act of displaying these humble mementos retail shops. They can serve
strictly decorative purposes
takes on significance when it stimulates prayer for the missionaries,
as collectibles or mementos
increases solidarity with a local church where other members are from travel or as reminders
of one's faith. Photo ©
doing the same thing, and perhaps even provides some sense of fel¬
Ethan R. Sanders. Used by
lowship with far distant members of the worldwide Christian commu¬ permission.

nity. Such decorations also mark the household as a “Christian home”

with distinctive Christian interests.
The community-building aspect of material culture is often overt
among evangelicals. Community building through the display in the
home of missionary or local church reminders is sometimes matched
by self-conscious choice of retailers outside of the home. When evan¬
gelical mechanics or carpet cleaners put an ichthus on their business
186 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

cards, they are both making a statement about themselves and looking
for business from fellow believers. Beginning in the 1970s and 1980s,
evangelical organizations began publishing business guides (some¬
times called “Christian Yellow Pages”) in order to direct the Bible-
believing populace to Bible-believing proprietors. Entire sectors,
like the Christian cruise business, now exist to cater to the Christian
market exclusively.
The construction of evangelical identity and community happens
from an early age and is strongly influenced by material culture. Thus,
most Christian retail stores offer a wide array of products for the very
young, including objects for home or Sunday school instruction like
play sets of Noahs Ark, nativity sets, puzzles, picture books, lesson
plans, and flannel boards. For a subculture more at home with words
and general images, the depiction of Jesus is a regular exception to
the evangelical wariness of icons narrowly defined. Christian retailers
have come to provide a parallel universe to American merchandis¬
ing in general, with videos such as Veggie Tales or Wemmick Stories,
Christian figurines like Bibleman or Davey and Goliath, Christian
plush toys, Christian video games, Christian board games, and even
Christian candy.
The roots of contemporary evangelical material culture extend
back at least two centuries, as indicated by the wide range of goods
offered for sale in the first generation of mass evangelical periodicals
in the nineteenth century.34 By the start of the twenty-first century,
however, the fruits had grown in directions undreamt of in those
earlier days. Especially from the 1960s the vehicles of evangelical mer¬
chandising and the vehicles of more general American merchandising
have come very close together.
Critics of these developments fear that evangelical faith has been
co-opted by mainstream commercialism, with the result that the
sacred is trivialized beyond hope.35 Yet as McDannell notes shrewdly,
North American evangelicals have rarely displayed much interest in
the kind of critical thinking that worries about such trivialization.
Rather, the emphasis among evangelicals has always been on “doing
religious activities and identifying oneself as Christian.”36 A surpris¬
ing proportion of evangelical homes would have some familiarity
with solid middlebrow authors like C. S. Lewis or John Stott, many
 Evangelicalism in North America I Noll and Sanders 187

more would be familiar with what populists like James Dobson,

Chuck Colson, or Billy Graham are saying, but almost all would
know what WWJD on a child’s bracelet means and would be pleased
to see such a bracelet worn. If children are more familiar with Bob
the Tomato and other Veggie Tales characters than with the bibli¬
cal figures they are meant to represent, the theology has definitely
become materialized and commercialized, but it has not vanished
altogether. In the increasing homogeneity of contemporary com¬
mercial society, self-identification by refrigerator magnet does not
sound heroic, but it may still be effective. If evangelicals have acceded
to an unprecedented commercialization of their lives, they have not
given up the evangelical conviction (which drives the missionaries
memorialized on so many magnets) that the Christian gospel can
find a home in any culture, even a culture of unprecedented com¬
mercialization. As Colleen McDannell has noted perceptively, for a
religion organized around the incarnation of God in human flesh, it
is not in principle a false step to work at incarnating that religion in
contemporary commercial culture. Questions of integrity, of quality,
of priorities, or of self-criticism do, however, remain—not so much
about whether this kind of evangelical material culture is acceptable
in broadly evangelical terms, but how and why and to what end it is
taking place.

THE INFLUENCE OF EVANGELICALISM

Brief examination of prayer, public worship, and material culture is
not enough to chart a full peoples’ history of North American evan¬
gelical Christianity. The very diversity of the movement militates
against that possibility, since every trend spotlighted as typical in
the preceding pages is challenged by some recognizably evangelical
voices. Moreover, these three aspects of ordinary religious life, though
of great importance, by no means encompass the whole of evangelical
lived religion.
What this chapter’s analysis does suggest, however, is that evan¬
gelical engagement with broader North American culture continues
along lines laid down in earlier generations. American and Canadian
188 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

evangelicals were in the vanguard of creating their national civiliza¬

tions, especially in the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century.
Despite the push early in the twentieth century by some members of
the fundamentalist movement to distance evangelical religion from
the secular world, even fundamentalists maintained the traditional
evangelical symbiosis with the host culture. Sometimes, by pioneer¬
ing in the use of radio for mass communication or organizing locally
without heeding guidelines from national denominations, for exam¬
ple, fundamentalists extended evangelical engagement with American
material culture.37
That engagement has only expanded over the course of the last
century, and with mixed results. Evangelicals, with Pentecostals and
the Jesus People showing the way, have accomplished a significant
baptism of popular music. In the process, theological depth has been
sacrificed, but the compensation is broad access to a broad range of
ordinary Americans with a gospel message that retains many features
of the historical faith. In other venues, the exchange has been more
one-sided. North American evangelicals once observed Sunday with
nearly universal understanding about what it meant to honor the
Lords Day.38 When the inner drive of evangelical religion motivated
such observance, Sundays could be luminous. When evangelicals
turned to public legislation to enforce Sunday observance, it looked
like a sign of cultural strength but was probably the beginning of the
end. After the Second World War, evangelical acceptance of standard
American practices—television, commercialization, leisure, the shop¬
ping mall, and the other options fueled by unprecedented wealth-
doomed the evangelical Sunday to near extinction.
It is an old question whether evangelical efforts at reaching the
populace have done more to Christianize the society or socialize the
Christians.39 But whether for itinerant preachers in the eighteenth
century, mass advertisers in evangelical magazines during the nine¬
teenth century, fundamentalist radio preachers in the early decades of
the twentieth century, or Christian merchandisers in the early twenty-
first century, it remains a good question.
 Evangelicalism in North America | Noll and Sanders 189

FOR FURTHER READING

Ammerman, Nancy Tatom. Pillars of Faith: American Congregations and Their Partners.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
Balmer, Randall. Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subcul¬
ture in America, 4th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Eskridge, Larry. “Gods Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America,
1966-1977.” Ph.D. diss., Stirling University, Scotland, 2005.
Hangen, Tona J. Redeeming the Dial: Radio, Religion, and Popular Culture in America.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
McDannell, Colleen. The Christian Home in Victorian America, 1840-1900. Blooming¬
ton: Indiana University Press, 1986.
-. Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1995.
Miller, Donald E. Reinventing American Protestantism: Christianity in the New Millen¬
nium. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Ostrander, Rick. The Life of Prayer in a World of Science: Protestants, Prayer, and Ameri¬
can Culture, 1870-1930. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Rawlyk, George A. Is Jesus Your Personal Saviour? In Search of Canadian Evangelicalism
in the 1990s. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1996.
Warner, R. Stephen. New Wine in Old Wineskins: Evangelicals and Liberals in a Small-
Town Church. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
 PENTECOSTAL TRANSFORMATION
IN LATIN AMERICA

LUIS N. RIVEBA-PAGAN
CHAPTER SEVEN

FATED TO POVERTY
Sidney W. Mintzs Worker in the Cane: A Puerto Rican Life History,
published in 1960, is a classic text in anthropology. It follows the life
and travails of Anastacio (Taso) Zayas Alvarado, a cane worker of poor
origins and dismal prospects who from his childhood was destined for
the crushing manual labor typical of Caribbean sugarcane plantations.
This is, sadly, the story of many Latin Americans who struggle to over¬
come grievous poverty while striving to confer meaning to a human
existence at the margins of any social hierarchy.
Most scholars who examine the text stress the futile efforts of Taso
Zayas to forge a brighter economic future for his family. But they fre¬
quently have disregarded what truly astounded Mintz: Zayass unex¬
pected conversion to Pentecostalism. From that dramatic religious
experience arose Zayass profound conviction that, despite the severe
social conditions of his life, his existence had now gained an eternal
significance, and he had been blessed with heavenly salvation, had
become a child of God and temple of the Holy Spirit.1
This story of extraordinary healing, both physical and spiritual,
gives us a view into the sudden and dramatic irruption of Pentecostal
Christianity in Latin America. This charismatic way of conceiving
of and living the Christian faith has transgressed the boundaries of
what for centuries had been the normative dogmatic and ecclesiasti¬
cal expression of Christianity in the region. It has reconfigured the

190
Pentecostal Transformation in Latin America Rivera-Pagan 191

self-understanding, family life, and communal existence of millions

of working-class men and women.2 In short, it is a narrative of unex¬
pected transformation that in its particularity becomes paradigmatic
of a religious revolution for Latin American Christianity.
Mintz’s initial interest in Taso Zayas’s life had nothing to do
with religiosity. Neither the scholar nor Zayas seemed to care much
about sacred issues, matters of doctrine, liturgical rites, or theological
creeds. Mintz’s scholarly concern was typical of the mid-twentieth
century, namely, how the process of modernization and industrial¬
ization affected and shaped the existence of rural workers. Taso was
one of a multitude of men and women in Latin America who lacked
schooling, land, and house, who from cradle to grave were in bondage
to an accelerated capitalization of one product, geared toward export
and controlled by foreign corporations. In the Caribbean during the
first half of the twentieth century, that meant sugarcane. The region
had become a huge plantation devoted to sweetening the consump¬
tion habits of metropolitan cities all over the world while embittering
the lives of so many native workers, modern versions of the African
slaves who used to sweat and die in the fields of the islands.3
Taso Zayas was nothing more than another worker at a sugarcane
plantation, constantly striving and yet failing to make ends meet as he
worked from sunrise to sunset to provide food and clothing for his
common-law wife, Elizabeth, and his twelve children, of whom three
died in their early childhood. Fatherless at the age of ten months (in
1908) and motherless when he was twelve (1920), he suffered from
painful aches caused by the hard labor he had to perform daily. His
domestic life was plagued by continual bickering with Elizabeth—not
exactly an image of happiness and comfort of any kind.
Zayas was not a passive pawn in the winds of social destiny, for
at times he was very active in Puerto Ricos general confederation of
workers and in the reformist Popular Democratic Party. The 1940s
were for him a decade of intensely felt social disillusionment, followed
by bitter frustrations. Everything promised to change; everything
remained the same. Zayas did not seem to fit well into the social pat¬
terns of power struggles. Labor union organizing and political activ¬
ism resembled Sisyphus’s curse.
192 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

CONVERSION, SPIRITUAL BAPTISM, HEALING

Yet in 1950, as he was plagued by poverty, pain, and frustration, some¬
thing astonishing happened in Zayass life: a radical disruption of his
previous self-understanding and existence. As was so frequent though
paradoxical in Latin American patriarchal society, the women of the
house took the first step. Elizabeth and their oldest daughter, Car¬
men Iris, went to a Pentecostal healing crusade. They came back with
amazing stories of miraculous healings, charismatic happenings, and
conversions. Extraordinary events seemed to be taking place, bringing
joy where suffering prevailed and hope where despair ruled.
Elizabeths life was haunted by the sinister memory of her father,
who had drunk heavily and mistreated her mother, and by her con¬
stant fights with Taso, caused by her suspicions about his possible
dalliances with other women. One night in the midst of a Pentecostal
revivalist session, she felt herself possessed by a supernatural power
that gave her the exceptional capability of speaking in tongues. The
preachers interpretation, to the joyful exclamations of the congrega¬
tion, was that Elizabeth had been baptized by the Holy Spirit. She had
been transformed into a new creature, her soul had been redeemed,
and she was assured of eternal salvation.
Mintz was astute enough to perceive the significance of female
priority in the religious conversion of this family. Indeed, as happens
throughout Latin America, conversion to evangelical Protestantism or
to Pentecostalism usually entails a sweeping reconfiguration of family
life. It is probably too much to claim that it fundamentally alters the
patriarchal hierarchy of authority, for the biblical literalism to which it
is closely linked is suffused with notions of masculine primacy. But it
frequently transforms the patterns of behavior of the husband/father,
who adopts a sterner moral discipline and now abstains from invest¬
ing money and energy in drinking, womanizing, and betting.4 The
patriarchal hierarchy might be left in place and even theologically
reinforced by biblical allusions to female submission in the New Testa¬
ment epistles (1 Cor. 14:34, Eph. 5:22, Col. 3:18, 1 Tim. 2:11-12, 1 Pet.
3:1), but the shape of masculine behavior is nonetheless substantially
reconfigured. The patriarchal household code acquires a benevolent
aspect.
Pentecostal Transformation in Latin America Rivera-Pagan 193

Zayas had always considered himself Roman Catholic, but

throughout his life he had regarded church activities as something
alien to his daily labors, sorrows, and illusions. He heard with some
reservations the strange stories narrated by his wife and daughter but
decided to attend one of the evangelistic campaigns of a visiting North
American preacher. As the evening progressed, Zayas experienced
something strange and unexpected: “Brother Osborn5 began to pray
for the sick. ... I felt something in my body, a thing—an extraordinary
thing—while he was praying for the sick. And later, after he finished
that prayer, I felt an ecstasy—something strange.... And afterward
I did not feel that pain that I
had been feeling. ... And up to
the present, thank God, I have
never felt that pain again.”6
Miraculous healing is noth¬
ing new in Latin American
religious traditions. There are
several sites considered sacred,
where healing divine grace is
implored and received. The
most famous of all is the basil¬
ica of the Virgin of Guadalupe,
in Mexico. The basilica brims
with thousands of ex-votos of
gratitude for the healing mira¬
cles performed by the Guadalupe.7 Since her first alleged appearance Fig. 7.1. Healing of blind
to the indigenous man Juan Diego, in December 1531, countless acts girl: Photo of Victory Chris¬
tian Center, Crusade in the
of divine healing have been attributed to the Patroness of Mexico and Dominican Republic, 2005.
Photo © Victory Christian
Latin America. Though the Guadalupe has also fulfilled a meaningful
Center, Tusla, Okla.
role in the formation of the Mexican national identity,8 it is probably
true that common people throughout Mexico, Latin America, and the
Hispanic diaspora in the United States look to the Virgin more as a
maternal source of extraordinary favors in situations of grave distress
than as a patriotic icon.
Miraculous healings are usually attributed to a holy person, most
of the time the Mother of Christ, and happen in a sacred place, in
this case the Tepeyac. Both the holy person and the place are linked
 194 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

to a sacred myth of origin that first circulated

orally and then was recorded in writing. Zayas’s
healing, however, belongs to a different genre.
Stories now abound in Latin America of heal-
ings that occur in many scattered places, with
no sacred myths of origin, performed after the
intercessory prayers of evangelists unrecognized
by mainstream churches. Such healings take
place under the aegis of churches and congrega¬
tions of relatively new origins and picturesque
names (such as Iglesia del Buen Pastor, Iglesia
del Getsemani, Fuente de Agua Viva, Roca
de Salvacion), many of them founded by self-
appointed preachers. They might take place any¬
where—a football stadium, a recently opened
storefront church, the town square, places not
usually considered sacred—and are performed
by ministers not accredited by any theological
academy or any of the traditional Christian con¬
fessions. One might speak of a radical democra¬
Fig. 7.2. Blessed Virgin of tization and popularization of divine healing.
Guadalupe mural, Mexico
City. Photo © Rene Sheret/ The healings are usually perceived as extraordinary events. But as
Stone/Getty Images. Used happens so frequently in the history of the Christian faith, this move¬
by permission. Tradition says
that the first apparition of ment is also a process of the retrieval of a tradition not entirely erased
the Virgin in Mexico dates from the memory of the believing community. After all, miraculous
from December 1531, when
the Virgin appeared to Juan healings abound in the Gospels and the chronicles of the first apostles.
Diego and told him: "You “Signs and wonders” (John 4:48) were part and parcel of the early Jesus
should know, son, that I am
the Virgin Mary, Mother of movement and were considered indications of a decisive irruption of
the true God. I want a house
divine power and mercy in human history. When John the Baptist had
and a chapel, a church to
be built for me, in which doubts about the identity of Jesus, he sent some of his disciples to ques¬
to show myself a merciful
tion the Galilean. Jesus, true to form, replied indirectly by signaling
Mother to you and yours, to
those devoted to me and to his acts of healing: “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind
those who seek me in their
receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear,
necessities." Adapted by Luiz
Nascimento from Mexican the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.
Phoenix: Our Lady of Gua¬
dalupe: Image and Tradition
And blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me” (Matt. 11:2-6).
across Five Centuries by Jesus’ first commission to his disciples, according to an early memoir,
D. A. Brading (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, included the performance of similar “signs and wonders”: “Cure the
2002), 60. sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons” (Matt. 10:8).
Pentecostal Transformation in Latin America | Rivera-Pagan 195

The first controversial public act of the apos¬

tles Peter and John was to cure someone lame Healing
since birth (Acts 3:1-10). The religious authorities In the moment when Brother Osborn
were strongly annoyed, not only because an act of began to pray for the sick, my own
divine grace had taken place outside the margins case came immediately to my mind.
of the sacred place, in the portico of Jerusalem’s When he began to pray, he spoke in
temple, but also because the authors were “unedu¬ this way: "All those who have sickness

cated and ordinary men” (Acts 4:13) who lacked in any part—put your hands on the

the social, academic, and ritual credentials tra¬ affected place, whoever has different
illnesses." And I lifted my hand to the
ditionally required to mediate divine grace. The
spot where I really felt pain. And while
“wonders and signs” (Acts 2:43) of those “unedu¬
the brother prayed, I felt something in
cated and ordinary men” were construed as a seri¬
my body, a thing—an extraordinary
ous challenge to the authority of the priesthood
thing—while he was praying for the
and scribal experts.
sick. And later, after he finished that
The “signs and wonders” of Pentecostalism prayer, I felt an ecstasy—something
that bewilder so many of its observers are an strange—and then it went away.
expression of a characteristic common to most —Taso Zayas, quoted in Sidney W.
Christian reform movements—an attempt to Mintz, Worker in the Cane:
recover lost dimensions of the early Christian A Puerto Rican Life History (New
apostolic community. In this case, those lost York: Norton, 1974 [I960]), 211.

dimensions are physical healings, reception of the

Holy Spirit, glossolalia, passionate devotion to the
faith, and priority of the poor (“uneducated and ordinary”) people in
the worshiping community.
Zayass healing was neither unique nor peculiar. In twentieth-
century Latin America healing divine grace seemed to abound,
manifesting itself in multiple forms outside the boundaries of the
established church. Acts of healing and exorcism occurred thanks to
the intercession of evangelists whose ministry was ignored by most
mainstream churches, and they benefited common people like Taso
Zayas. Once again, as so many times before in history, divine grace
seemed to surpass and overwhelm the hierarchical patrolling of eccle¬
siastical frontiers.
Despite the constant attribution to Latin American Pentecostalism
of ethereal spiritualism and otherworldliness, researchers are astounded
by the importance of corporeal healing for many charismatic Pente¬
costal churches. The body recovers the centrality that it enjoyed in the
early Jesus movement. There are sensible reasons for this. These are
196 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

men and women whose

physical and social sur¬
vival is predicated upon
their ability to perform
hard manual labor and
who therefore need to
have strong and healthy
bodies to provide for
the well-being of their
families. They are poor
and do not have the
financial resources to
pay for expensive medi¬
Fig. 7.3. Honduras Church cal services. They are also denizens of nations lacking adequate social
Leaders Conference and
Crusade with Rev. Dr. health institutions. Thus, a debilitating illness becomes a matter of
Jae-Rock Lee. Photo © life and death. In such a grave situation, sometimes the only hope of
Urim Book USA. Used by
permission. the powerless appears to be divine intervention. For countless rural
and urban poor workers, serious sickness becomes the occasion to
implore the Virgin or to attend a healing crusade with anxious hope
in their hearts that they might become beneficiaries of merciful divine
power.
In the twentieth century new and more accessible healing com¬
petitors to the Virgin suddenly began to spread across Latin America.
Divine grace took a more popular and democratic shape. Dozens
of uneducated and ordinary men and women became mediators of
divine healing power.9 This process simultaneously implied a critical
downgrading of the Virgin Marys role in creedal faith and religious
rites, a dimension of the antagonism of Latin American evangelicals
and Pentecostals toward Roman Catholicism.
Physical healing might have been the starting point, but conversion,
as Zayas explained to Mintz, entailed other decisive dimensions. After
attending the worship services of the Pentecostal chapel in his barrio
for several weeks, Zayas experienced an extraordinary event usually
known in that ecclesiastical tradition as baptism by the Holy Spirit. He
was a man of few words, but his narration of the blessing of the Holy
Spirit had subtle tinges of deep spiritual gratification: “And while one
is praying one feels as if something comes and fills one.... I received a
blessing ... at the same time one receives the tongues. And when one
Pentecostal Transformation in Latin America Rivera-Pagan 197

is baptized with the Spirit... one feels most content.... When a per¬
son thus receives the blessing of the Holy Ghost, it is a great joy that a
Christian feels.... One is exceedingly happy.”10 A man whose life had
been extremely difficult—in continuous bondage to strenuous work
and poverty, plagued by debilitating pain, in perennial marital stress,
and with a history of disappointments in labor union and political
affairs—suddenly felt joyful thanks to the divine blessing of baptism by
the Holy Spirit. His taciturn and somewhat trite witness lacks eloquence
but nonetheless expresses the radical newness of his self-understanding
by stressing that he felt “full”: “One receives the Spirit... that comes
and fills one.... Yes something comes and fills one.”11 Plenitude has
displaced hollowness at the core of his mind and heart.
The experience of an uneducated and ordinary person speaking in
divine tongues under the blessing of the Holy Spirit is not only memo¬
rable; it also leads to a momentous reappraisal of his or her entire
existence. The hearing of the gospel, preached in clear, simple words,
awakened in Zayas a deep sense first of guilt and then of absolution.
“In truth at times one feels, eh—guilty of many things.... All of those
things must be changed.”12 Zayas was not one to belabor the things he
used to do that he now considered sinful, and it would be unfair to
attempt to fill in the blanks, but the idea is emblematic of many similar
experiences: a rejection of a former lifestyle now
perceived as violating God’s will, the sense of hav¬
ing been forgiven, and the decision to lead a holier Guilt and Absolution
life. Sanctification is taken seriously as a necessary Now, in that moment that I felt—eh—

consequence of spiritual baptism. eh—guilty, it was because I used to

In this narration, the emphasis is not upon the do many things they prohibit. That
is the guilty part of what I was feel¬
traditional baptism by water, but upon the spectac¬
ing. Before, as I said, Elizabeth and I
ular event of the reception of the Holy Spirit. Eliza¬
used to have our differences and we
beth was more loquacious, more expressive with
used to quarrel and such things. And
words, and her description of the baptism by the
when they explain these things, then
Spirit was more dramatic than Tasos. “There came
one feels guilty. I felt guilty, and she
this peculiar thing. It invaded my whole body.... [Elizabeth] must have too.
I began to tremble.... My body was moving —Sidney W. Mintz,
more .. . until at last something ... compelled me Worker in the Cane: A Puerto Rican
to dance. ... I could not control myself.... And Life History (New York: Norton, 1974
then I spoke in other languages, like Hebrew or [I960]), 217.
something like that. ... Meanwhile ... there were
198 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

those strong movements in my body... and for the sheer pleasure

of it, one goes speaking in tongues.... I felt as if my face were being
lighted up by a flashlight. And I felt more alive than ever, and happier
than ever.”13
A poor woman—who had seen her mother mistreated by her
drunkard father, felt disregarded by her husband, had suffered three of
Figs. 7.4 and 7.5 A large-
scale Protestant religious her children dying in their infancy, and was overworked in caring for
ceremony at the Maracaha
her other children—suddenly felt “more alive than ever, and happier
soccer stadium in Rio de
Janeiro, Brazil, in the than ever” after being baptized by the Holy Spirit. She felt that divine
summer of 2004. Although
this ceremony was open
power—“there is something powerful... beyond the firmament one
to all denominations, most sees”14—had entered into her and conferred on her amazing gifts.15
ar^PentecostaE°Photos ©° E^zabeth and Taso describe their incorporation into a Pentecostal
Marshall Roderick. church, but curiously neither mentions the traditional sacrament of
water baptism. It probably took place,
but as a sacramental event it was over¬
shadowed by the spiritual baptism. This
constitutes an important, though usually
overlooked, recasting of the theological
understanding of baptism. Baptism by
the Spirit, not by water, becomes the
decisive transforming and empowering
experience.
One important outcome of conver¬
sion and spiritual baptism is peace of
mind. Joy and hope displace anger and
frustration. It is first expressed in family
life. The bitter fights between husband
and wife disappear. “When you seek
God,” according to Taso, “then you are
made a new creature and then you have
peace in your home, then you have con¬
tentment.”16 But his wider communal
context also changed. This is signaled
mainly by his continual references to
the members of his church as “brothers”
and “sisters,” an indication that Taso and
Elizabeth are now members of a new
Pentecostal Transformation in Latin America Rivera-Pagan 199

type of family and that their church functions not only as a place for
common worship but also as a network of vital support and solidar¬
ity. For Taso, the solutions once searched for in the labor union or in
the political party are now to be found in the community of believ¬
ers. Indeed, Pentecostal congregations in Latin America frequently
perform useful services of solidarity in situations of social distress so
common in the lives of their members.

BECOMING PEOPLE OF THE BOOK?

Conversion did not drastically change the socioeconomic situation
of Zayas and his family. They were poor before it and remained poor
afterward. “His work takes him to the cane, along the railroad tracks
and on the spurs, eight hours a day in the sun.... He and Eli and
seven of their children live in their little house, eating their rice and
beans and drinking black coffee, entertaining themselves with the
Bible and the tambourine and the gossip of the barrio.”17 In fact, one
might suspect that the midcentury decline of sugarcane production
on the island and its replacement by small manufacturing plants
requiring higher levels of technological skills possibly placed his fam¬
ily under even worse economic stress.
Despite the connections that some scholars predict, in a too-facile
optimistic Weberian mood, between conversion to a morally stern
religiosity and socioeconomic upward mobility, more frequently than
not the poor remain poor. After all, modern economic globalization
never truly intended the elimination of poverty. Its preferred biblical
mantra is probably Matthew 25:29 (“for to all those who have, more
will be given, and they will have in abundance.”)
And indeed, the second half of the twentieth century was not
generous to the Latin American poor. The glad tidings of socialist
revolution, national security military juntas, liberation theology, and
neoliberal globalization had all been proclaimed, leaving behind a
trail of broken promises and frustrated hopes. However, millions of
Latin Americans, in the midst of dreadful poverty and turbulent revo¬
lutions, still believed firmly that their lives had changed significantly.
They held fast to the conviction that, thanks to the Holy Spirit, they
200 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

possessed a new identity and were now “children of God,” members of

the community of saints, chosen for eternal salvation. They gathered
assiduously in austere temples and chapels, built by their own hands
and devoid of the grandeur of Roman Catholic sacred architecture, to
praise God, study the Bible, perform acts of exorcism, heal the sick,
and share in the tribulations and good news of their fellow brothers
and sisters.
The story of Zayas and his wife is superbly narrated by Sidney
Mintz, but the anthropologist could not hide his surprise at their
conversion to the newly introduced Pentecostalism. Mintz was no
apologist for the newcomer evangelists, and his last sentences poeti¬
cally betray his secularist perspective. “Tasos story has no moral....
Or perhaps the reader will see the waste I think I see: the waste of a
mind that stands above the others as the violet sprays of the flor de
cana tower above the cane.”18 A wasted mind? Maybe from the per¬
spective of an academician who values intellectual achievement, but
that is not how Taso and Elizabeth perceived themselves. When asked,
they emphasize the healing of their bodies and the salvation of their
souls. They have been healed, have received the blessing of the Holy
Spirit, and have the Bible, as the word of God, constantly within reach.
They are now members of the community of believers and possess the
assurance of eternal redemption. They have come to see themselves
as privileged citizens of the kingdom of heaven. They even learned to
play the tambourine.
At the core of all of these phenomena lay another crucial change
in the minds of people like Taso and Elizabeth that seems to have
escaped Mintz: They have become readers. In the more than two
hundred pages of Mintz s study of Tasos life before his conversion,
it is obvious that Taso did not care for books or any type of reading.
He apparently was not analphabetic, but certainly illiterate. Totally
absorbed in daily labors, he had neither time for nor interest in books
or journals. After their conversion, he and his wife may still not be
people of books, but they have certainly joined the company of the
people of the Book. Now Taso and Elizabeth read the Bible constantly,
in the congregation and in their house.
Conversion entails a novel source of certainty regarding the place
of humanity in the divinely ordered cosmos. The Bible is now per¬
ceived as the word of God. In the middle of the twentieth century,
Pentecostal Transformation in Latin America I Rivera-PagAn 201

evangelicals in Latin America could be distinctly recognized by a

book they carried constantly and quoted ceaselessly, the Bible. It was
always at the center of the congregation and in the living room of the
house. It was seen as an infallible font of firm convictions and ideas.
It functioned symbolically as a talisman, an apotropaic (intended to
ward off evil) amulet, when risky activities were to be undertaken.
Only after the reforms approved by Second Vatican Council, in the
mid-1960s, would the Roman Catholic Church promote a similar
mass publication of the Bible in easily accessible editions.
Zayas explains how in his church they gathered around the Bible
and in a collegial way conversed about biblical doctrines. “Any other
doubt I might have I resolved in the Scriptures,” he affirms with con¬
fidence.19 Notice the prominence of the “I” in this statement; it is not
the case that the believers receive a body of doctrines from a hierarch
equipped with credentials of ecclesiastical authority. What they now
share is a sacred book to be read and interpreted by many uneducated
and ordinary men and women—people like Zayas. They have become
the people of the Bible, but the Bible has also become the book of the
people.
Merely one book is indeed a rather limited intellectual horizon.
Yet if someone, no matter his or her educational background, dili¬
gently reads the poetry of the Psalms, the biographical narrations of
the Gospels, the irate apostrophes of the prophets, or the subtle theo¬
logical deliberations of Paul, it is difficult not to surmise that such a
practice would indeed expand their repertoire of words, images, and
ideas. Taso and Elizabeth did not become biblical scholars by any
means. Their textual interpretations might be naive, but it is hard to
imagine their not acquiring a wider stock of linguistic and intellectual
skills simply by reading what is, after all, not an undemanding text.
Their reading of the Word increases their repertoire of words and,
what for them might be even more decisive, simultaneously trans¬
forms drastically their understanding of the world.

THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND THE KINGDOM OF THIS WORLD

Several scholars currently take a critical view of Christian Lalive
d’Epinays thesis about the otherworldliness and lack of political
202 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

awareness of the Pentecostal churches in Latin America. This rethink¬

ing takes place in the wake of the emergence of Neo-Pentecostal
megachurches and evangelical political parties all over Latin America.
Demographic growth has increased their political power and influ¬
ence. Numbers do make a difference when votes are counted.20 The
time has come when many Pentecostal churches take more interest in
the kingdom of this world and in earthly citizenship, and the debate is
now shifting its focus to the shape of their social engagement (includ¬
ing the intriguing question about the possible emergence of a Pente¬
costal theology of liberation).
The political awareness and activism of the Pentecostal churches
in Latin America, however, is a rather new process that has mainly
taken place since about 1990. In the mid-twentieth century the com¬
munity of the saints stressed separation and distinction from the
world, functioning as a refuge from its sorrows and temptations.
When prompted and challenged to confront controversial political
and social matters, most evangelical and Pentecostal churches would
quote Jesus’ words to Pilate as the legitimizing text for their politi¬
cal abstention: “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). The
severe Johannine strictures against the “world” were some of their
favorite biblical leitmotifs. The “world” was conceived as ruled by
demonic powers, under the tyranny of Satan. The most that could be
asked of the state was its protection of the right of the new churches to
preach and expand. Religious freedom might indeed have important
consequences for the democratization of any society, and mainstream
Protestant churches were usually aware of the link. Yet the concern
of most midcentury Pentecostal congregations was their right to pro¬
claim their charismatic version of the gospel free from restrictions by
the state or any legally established church.
For their part, Taso and Elizabeth seemed undisturbed by the
midcentury political and social turbulences taking place in Puerto
Rico, including the formation of a strong independence party, a
nationalist insurrection, the industrialization of the island, and the
establishment of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, an ambiguous
juridical relationship with the United States.21 In the midst of poverty
and sociopolitical transformations, Taso and Elizabeth were relatively
serene, for their minds and hearts revolved around the community of
Pentecostal Transformation in Latin America Rivera-Pagan 203

saints, the joy of the Spirit, and the promise of eternal salvation. In
political issues, they tended toward quietism rather than activism.
Taso did not continue his work in union-related and political mat¬
ters. He sees those activities as part of his former self, from which he
has been freed. The church now became the center of his aspirations
and exertions. We cannot tell from Mintz’s account whether at a later
date Taso became disenchanted with the church as well, but it can be
ascertained that some years after his unexpected and dramatic con¬
version, he still felt at home immersed in church activities. “He seems
serene” is Mintz’s terse description.22

TRANSFIGURING LATIN AMERICAN CHRISTENDOM

The spread of evangelical charismatic Christianity across Latin
America has not left the social situation intact. The growth of these
congregations has indeed changed the continental public landscape
considerably.
Since their colonial inception, Latin American nations were
characterized by an official linkage between the state and the Roman
Catholic Church. The royal patronage exercised by the Iberian crowns
entailed the acknowledgment by the church of the sovereignty and
authority of the metropolitan state, but also the states recognition
of the Roman Catholic Church’s exclusivity in religious affairs.23 It
was sometimes the source of acute conflicts, whenever the ethical
conscience of priests, missionaries, and theologians clashed with the
severe exploitation of the native communities.24 Yet it was a conve¬
nient arrangement for both partners, for it conferred a sacred aura to
the metropolitan sovereignty and conversely provided the church with
state protection.
The governments of the new states, which emerged after the
nineteenth-century wars of independence, promptly recognized the
advantages of royal patronage and tried to preserve it. This heritage
forged a particular brand of Christendom closely linking the state and
the Roman Catholic Church in Latin American countries, a condi¬
tion juridically inscribed in many national constitutions and Vatican
concordats.25
 204 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

This official connection between church and state was venerable

but also vulnerable. It became embroiled in countless disputes of
jurisdiction that sometimes resembled the renowned dispute between
Henry II and Becket, though most of these never produced martyrs
deserving similar fame or memory. Sometimes archbishops and bish¬
ops became decisive protagonists in the national drama, diminishing
the powers of the state and restricting the possibilities of religious
competition; at other times, the sword of the state curtailed severely
the rights and powers of the church. In a critical phase of the Mexican
Revolution, the church lost legal recognition, its property was nation¬
alized, and religious houses were closed. During the Colombian civil
war, on the other hand, Catholics massacred members of the evan¬
gelical minority under the excuse that the Protestants usually aligned
themselves with the Liberal faction. In general, only the Roman
Catholic Church had the legal and political credentials to influence
national destinies.
Conversion experiences like those of Taso and Elizabeth have
substantially changed and dramatically complicated the religious
landscape of Latin America. Titles like that of David Stolls book—Is
Latin America Turning Protestant?26—might be hyperbolic and mis¬
leading, but it is indeed true that evangelical and Pentecostal churches
of all kinds and varieties are sprouting up all over Central America.
In Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Brazil, and Puerto Rico, on any
given Sunday morning possibly more hymns are sung, sermons are

Fig. 7.6. Mother Church of

preached, exorcisms are performed, and prayers are offered to God
the Christian Congregation in Protestant churches than in Catholic ones. The exceptional growth
in Brazil, located in the
Italian Braz District, in Sao of the variegated Pentecostal expressions of the Christian faith has
Paulo, Brazil. The Christian indeed reshaped the religious configuration of the entire region.27
Congregation in Brazil is also
called Congregagao Crista In changing the religious landscape, widening the horizons of
no Brasil. religious liberty, and forging a ferocious competition for the souls
and hearts of believers, these charis¬
matic congregations have fragmented
the traditional Latin American model of
Christendom. Their presence and activi¬
ties constitute one of the most important
transformations of the Latin American
human landscape of the past century.
No history of twentieth-century Latin
Plate A. Christ in the Mangerby Francis Musango (Uganda). The African setting of Christ in the Manger evokes the ongoing creation
of a Christianity on that vast continent that is authentically African in its theological, liturgical, and cultural interpretations. Courtesy
National Archives (Contemporary African Art Select List collection, #137).
Plate B. Peace Be Still, He Qi (China). The painter He Qi places himself in a fifth generation of Chinese Christian artists, a lineage that
began with seventh-century Nestorian Christians of the Tang Dynasty. Well known in both East and West, he uses bright colors, modern
art styles, and folk art in his non-Western depiction of Bible scenes and stories. Used by permission. For more information and art by He Qi,
please visit www.heqigallery.com.
Plate C. “Mary... Rabboni"... John20:16(batik, 1999) by Hanna-Cheriyan Varghese (Malaysia). Malaysian
Christian artist Varghese sets Jesus' and Mary Magdalen's Easter morning encounter in a brightly colored eastern
garden: "Jesus said, 'Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father.... Mary of Magdala went to the
disciples with her news: 'I have seen the Lord.'" © Hanna-Cheriyan Varghese. Used by permission.
Plate D. Their arms stretched to the sky, delegates from the ecclesial base communities of Liberation Theology come together
for their sixth meeting, generating fervor and fresh initiative for the implementation of social reform at the grassroots level,
Trinidad, Brazil, July 1986. © Bernard Bisson/Sygma/Corbis.
Plate E. Feeding of the 5,000(1999) by Laura James. Ethiopian Christian iconography is a major inspiration in the art of Laura James, a self-
taught American artist of Antiguan heritage, who was commissioned in 2001 to create thirty-five images for a new, multicultural reading of the
Book of the Gospels by Liturgy Training Publications. © Laura James. Used by permission.
Plate F. Black Madonna II (Classic), April 1998, by Elizabeth Barakah Hodges. Tradition and innovation come together in this late
twentieth-century icon-like Black Madonna, which is a work in mixed media. Iris Rose Hart Collection, © Elizabeth Barakah Hodges /
SuperStock. Used by permission.
Plate G. The Rapture by Charles Anderson. The Conservative Christian belief in the Rapture is complicated by several different biblical,
theological, and historical plot-lines. At its most basic it posits an unexpected moment in the future when Jesus returns and true Christians
disappear from the earth in the midst of their everyday activities. Image courtesy of Bible Believers' Evangelistic Association (www.bbea.org).
Plate H. The Creche (ca. 1929-1933) by Joseph Stella (1879-1946). The intriguing work by Italian-born American Modernist/Futurist painter
Joseph Stella offers a vision of people from all over the world and all walks of life gathered in community around the manger scene. Photo ©
The Newark Museum / Art Resource, N.Y. Used by permission.
Pentecostal Transformation in Latin America I Rivera-Pagan 205

America is complete if it leaves outside its margins the evangelical and

Pentecostal reshaping of the continental religious configuration. It has
become a meaningful part of the story of many men and women who,
in very severe socioeconomic straits, strive simultaneously to create
an earthly home for their bodies and to affirm their belonging to a
heavenly home.
Some scholars have made the case that despite their initial isola¬
tion from the public and political arenas and their tendency toward a
conservative stance regarding ethical issues, the evangelical and Pen¬
tecostal churches widen the democratic character
of Latin American societies. They point out, first,
Speaking in Tongues
that to become a member of any of these congre¬
And while I was glorifying, I know that
gations, which lack the aura of traditional social
at one point I wanted to say, "Glory
legitimation, requires a free and conscious deci¬ to God, Hallelujah," and I could not.
sion—a crucial building block of any democracy. I swallowed my tongue, and then I
Second, these churches’ tend to be more partici¬ spoke in other languages, like Hebrew
patory and less restricted by a professional clergy, or something like that. The pastor said
thus inspiring a less passive attitude on important I was going to something in tongues;
• • oq
community issues. and then I heard Brother Juan say,
It is probably safer to say that the jury is "She has received it! She has spoken
still out regarding the political consequences of in tongues, in spiritual tongues." And

the increase in the diversity of evangelical and meanwhile, while I was in that state,
there were those strong movements in
Pentecostal expressions of Christianity in Latin
my body. Something comes—comes
America. Some of these new churches tend to
to where one is, and for the sheer
be very congregational and participatory; others,
pleasure of it, one goes on speaking in
however, are under the iron-fisted control of their
tongues. One does not know what one
founders and self-designated apostles and tend is saying, and one is left speaking that
to mirror the autocratic character of traditional way without knowing how.
haciendas and plantations. Some might question —Sidney W. Mintz, Worker in the
traditional norms of social conduct; others, on Cane: A Puerto Rican Life History
the contrary, espouse very conservative social (New York: Norton, 1974 [I960]), 242.
and sexual ethics. What is undeniable is that tra¬
ditional monopolistic Christendom, as known for centuries in Latin
America, has been superseded by a bewildering variety of forms of
living and thinking the Christian faith. The actions of the Holy Spirit,
contrary to Augustine’s restriction of the Spirit within the confines of
the Catholic Church, seem to promote diversity, division, and, from
time to time, even bitter competition for the hearts and souls of the
206 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

people. Under the proclaimed aegis of the Spirit, Latin American

Christendom is indeed undergoing a dramatic and profound religious
transfiguration.

PROVISIONAL PREDICTIONS
It is too early to predict with a high degree of confidence the long-range
consequences of the impressive growth of Pentecostal Christianity in
Latin America, but some provisional suspicions can be suggested.
There has been a dramatic battle for the spirit of the poor between
the Pentecostal churches, with their pneumatological emphasis, and
the Catholic ecclesial base communities inspired by liberation theol¬
ogy. Liberation theology made the preferential option for the poor a
cardinal theological and ecclesiastical principle. It also foregrounded
the primacy of the hermeneutical perspective of the poor. Ernesto
Cardenals famous The Gospel in Solentiname (first published in 1978)
became its poetical hermeneutical paradigm. Many poor, however,
have opted for the religiosity of the Spirit rather than for a theology
of political and social resistance. This tendency does not necessarily
lead us to the dirge of liberation theology prematurely sung by some
conservative critics. But it certainly complicates the image of the his¬
torical protagonism of the poor, in the midst of continuing poverty
and the new waves of enthusiasm for drastic social transformation
shaking Latin America during the first decade of the twenty-first cen¬
tury. Intriguingly enough, since the 1990s there have been increasing
signs of an emerging Pentecostal Latin American theological produc¬
tion.29 The script of Latin American liberation theology might yet be
redrafted, this time with surprising charismatic contours.
If we speak of the Latin American poor, then their racial and
ethnic identities must also be taken into account. Many of them are
indigenous (most prominently in Guatemala, Bolivia, Peru, Ecua¬
dor, and Mexico), African Americans (in Haiti, Brazil, Dominican
Republic, Cuba, and Puerto Rico), or mestizos, generated by the
multiple forms of miscegenation that have taken place during the
past five hundred years. These ethnic and racial communities have
suffered social discrimination and degradation, and many are now
Pentecostal Transformation in Latin America | Rivera-Pagan 207

attracted to the promise of spiritual dignity conveyed by the religions

of the Spirit.
“Syncretism” has always been a risky and potentially misleading
term in religious matters, but it is difficult to avoid the impression of
certain intimate interactions, in several autochthonous (indigenous)
communities, between the spirits of the ancestors and the Spirit of
the new Pentecost thriving all over Latin America. The boundaries
between the Christian Spirit and the spirits of indigenous and African
religiosities are frequently porous and symbiotic. It is not necessar¬
ily a conscious synthesis, but the primacy of orality in their liturgy,
the narrative style of their homilies, and their flexibility in integrat¬
ing popular rhythms and melodies into their worship constitute
points of contact of many Pentecostal churches with the spirituality
enshrined in the aesthetic traditions of autochthonous peoples. This
has led some scholars to perceive indigenous Pentecostalism in Latin
America, the Caribbean, and Africa as part and parcel of a process of
ethnic revitalization.30
Religion matters in Latin America. And it matters even more in its
increasing and astounding variety. The traditional binary confronta¬
tion between the secular state and the Roman Catholic Church is now
being displaced by an array of multiple relations among religiosities
of assorted theological and ritual configurations. The proliferation of
many of these congregations with their tendency to break off from
each other suggests a complex and confusing Latin American reli¬
gious map in the future. Such a spiritual configuration promises to
become a bewildering and ever-winding maze analogous to the fan¬
tastic labyrinths found in some of Jorge Luis Borges’s stories. Diversity
and complexity seem to be decisive hermeneutical keys in the religion
of the Spirit of this postmodern Zeitgeist.
Scholars and missiologists have recently stressed a crucial change
in the global demographics of Christianity.31 While the proportion
of Christians in the Western and Northern churches diminishes, the
churches in the South are growing geometrically. Some even predict
the emergence of a “next Christendom,” dominated by the churches
of Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia. If that is
a valid point, then much of the credit belongs to the explosion of
indigenous Pentecostal churches throughout the Third World. Future
208 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

historians might consider twentieth-century Pentecostalism as the

most significant global religious upheaval since the birth of Islam and
the Protestant Reformation.
What this might entail for the political and social conflict engen¬
dered by neoliberal globalization is hard to envisage. The leadership
of many of these churches is frequently authoritarian, conservative,
isolationist, and fundamentalist. As has been shrewdly observed, the
hierarchies of some Pentecostal churches, influenced by the North
American “theology of prosperity,” seem more interested in apostolic
success than in apostolic succession. Nevertheless, a growing body of
critical Pentecostal literature, open to political radicalism, challenges
the prevailing socioeconomic powers and is ready to engage in ecu¬
menical dialogue with other Christian partners. The future might be
less bleak than the one foreseen by many contemporary Cassandras.
Indeed, the vigorous spread of Pentecostal churches and move¬
ments in the twentieth century has complicated enormously another
of the main dimensions of that century of Christianity—the ecumeni¬
cal movement. Ecumenical dialogue has taken place mainly among
mainline Protestant churches, Roman Catholicism, and Eastern and
Oriental Orthodox churches. With few exceptions, the Pentecostal
movement, the fastest growing sector of Christianity during the past
hundred years, has kept its distance from the ecumenical dialogue
and has frequently viewed it with some degree of distrust. The Pen¬
tecostal churches are very young and still rather anxious to forge a
clear sense of their own identity. They have emerged and developed
in a social and ecclesiastical environment of contempt and disdain,
engendering their tendency toward isolation and clear boundaries of
separation.
The time may come when many of them will look more positively
toward dialogue and ecumenical collaboration with other Christian
churches. The success of Pentecostalism has promoted a mimetic
reaction in other branches of Christianity, as attested by the increas¬
ing popularity of the charismatic renewal movement in many Roman
Catholic Latin American dioceses. The enthusiastic Pentecostal style
of worship is also strongly influencing mainstream Protestant con¬
gregations. This has led some scholars to perceive, in analogy to Paul
Tillichs “Protestant principle,” a Pentecostal principle, a tendency
toward “pentecostality” that is not restricted to Pentecostal denomi-
Pentecostal Transformation in Latin America Rivera-PagAn 209

nations but is shaping the liturgical practices of many other Christian

churches.3" This liturgical convergence might constitute a bridge of
ecumenical dialogue and rapprochement between churches that usu¬
ally have stressed their doctrinal and theological differences.
Several times in the history of Christianity, an age of the Spirit has
been foreseen, predicted, and desired. The hierarchical church, with
its emphasis on orthodox doctrine, traditional liturgy, and accredited
priesthood, has frequently looked with distrust at these enthusiastic
aspirations, for it well knows how difficult it is to control and restrain
their possible consequences. The Spirit tends to overwhelm and trans¬
gress the boundaries so carefully drawn by ecclesiastical hierarchies.
“For the pneuma [spirit/wind] blows where it chooses . .. but you do
not know where it comes from or where it goes” (John 3:8).
This chapter began with Sidney Mintz’s engaging story of the
astounding conversion to charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity
of Taso Zayas and his wife, Elizabeth, two “uneducated and ordinary
people” from the Latin American Caribbean. Some skeptical minds
might recall John Lockes ironic observation regarding this type of
charismatic enthusiasm: “I ask how shall any one distinguish between
the delusions of Satan, and the inspirations of the Holy Ghost?”33
Still, for many other trustful believers, their story of healing, spiritual
baptism, and conversion was one of many similar signs that the age of
the Spirit had finally arrived. Like the wind from the Caribbean Sea,
whose storms bring disarray and redesign so many constructions in
the sands of human affairs, the new Pentecost of the Spirit seems to be
reconfiguring in unexpected ways the contours of the peoples history
of Christianity.34

FOR FURTHER READING

Anderson, Allan H., and Walter Hollenweger, eds. Pentecostals after a Century: Global
Perspectives on a Movement in Transition. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1999.
Chesnut, R. Andrew. Competitive Spirits: Latin Americas New Religious Economy.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Cleary, Edward L., and Hannah W. Stewart-Gambino, eds. Power, Politics, and Pentecos¬
tals in Latin America. Boulder: Westview, 1997.
Escobar, Samuel. Changing Tides: Latin America and World Mission Today. Maryknoll,
N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2002.
210 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

Gutierrez, Benjamin, and Dennis Smith, eds. In the Power of the Spirit: The Pentecostal
Challenge to Historic Churches in Latin America. Arkansas City: Asociacion de
Iglesias Presbiterianas y Reformadas en America Latina; Centro Evangelico Lati-
noamericano de Estudios Pastorales; Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Worldwide
Ministries Division, 1996.
Miguez Bonino, Jose. Faces of Latin American Protestantism. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
1997.
Shaull, Richard, and Waldo Cesar. Pentecostalism and the Future of the Christian
Churches: Promises, Limitations, Challenges. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000.
Sigmund, Paul E., ed. Religious Freedom and Evangelization in Latin America: The Chal¬
lenge of Religious Pluralism. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1999.
Silveira Campos, Leonildo. Teatro, templo e mercado: Organizaqao e marketing de um
empreendimento neopentecostal. Petropolis, Brazil: Editora Vozes, 1997.
Stoll, David. Is Latin America Turning Protestant? The Politics of Evangelical Growth.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
APOCALYPTICISM
IN THE UNITED STATES

BRUCE DAVID FORBES

CHAPTER EIGHT

A t the very end of the twentieth century in the United States, an

explicitly Christian series of novels about the end-times, Left
Behind, sat atop most major best-seller lists. These lists did not chart
sales at conservative Christian bookstores; they indicated purchases
by the general public at stores like Borders, Barnes & Noble, Target,
and Wal-Mart. When journalists and mainline religious leaders even¬
tually became aware of the Left Behind publishing phenomenon, most
ensuing discussions centered on disagreements among Christians
about whether they shared the theology, biblical interpretation, and
social and political perspectives espoused by the books. Yet few com¬
mentators noticed that the Left Behind series represented more than
just an example of controversy within formal Christian theology. The
books also represented the culmination of an unofficial, informal
theology expressed in American popular culture throughout much
of the twentieth century about cosmic battles between good and evil
and about the elimination of evil through violence. The Left Behind
books were accepted and thus popular because they resonated with
well-established beliefs and assumptions long expressed in American
popular culture, in examples such as the American western and comic
book superheroes. Along with an interplay of influence between pop¬
ular culture and organized religion, repeated motifs within popular
culture also are revealing: in essence they hold up a mirror that reflects
a network of basic beliefs embraced by many Americans, inside and
outside Christian churches. What the general public really believes

211
212 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

often finds expression more in the trends of popular culture than in

the statements of elite, formal theologians.

LEFT BEHIND BOOKS

In 1995 Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins published the first volume
of their series, titled Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days.
LaHaye was the best known of the two authors, prominent and often
combative in decades of evangelical Christian efforts, serving on
the board of the Moral Majority, advocating a literal reading of the
Bible, and opposing what he saw as the dangers of secular humanism,
including globalism, evolution, feminism, and homosexuality. One
commentator claimed that LaHaye was the most influential American
evangelical of the last quarter of the twentieth century.1 Left Behind
book covers identify LaHaye as the person who “conceived” the series,
but the actual writer was Jenkins, who previously had published over
one hundred less famous books of all kinds, especially for the Moody
Bible Institute. Jenkins completed coauthoring Billy Grahams autobi¬
ography, Just As I Am, and then began work on the series that was to
vault him into public attention he had not experienced before.2
The original intention was a short series of novels, but when
sales exceeded expectations, the plan expanded to twelve volumes,
with titles like Tribulation Force: The Continuing Drama of Those Left
Behind (1996), Nicolae: The Rise of the Antichrist (1997), Soul Harvest:
The World Takes Sides (1998), and so on. From initial print runs of
150,000 or 200,000 for the early books, later print runs started with
two to three million each. The Indwelling (2000), the seventh volume,
reached the number one position on four best-seller lists in fiction, in
the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, the Washington Post, and USA
Today. Desecration (2001), the ninth novel, was the best-selling fiction
title in the United States in 2001, dethroning John Grisham, who had
held that honor for several years. A widespread public mood of gen¬
eral speculation about the significance of the turn of the millennium
in 2000 and 2001 probably helped sales, but the authors and their
publisher, Tyndale House, were eager to continue their successful
venture as long as possible. When the initial series of twelve books was
 Apocalypticism in the United States I Forbes 213

completed in 2004, the authors and publisher

decided to add a prequel, then expanded the pre¬
quel into a trilogy, plus one last sequel. By that
time even the most avid fans seemed exhausted,
sales sputtered, and critics suspected a greater
interest in profits than prophets.
Yet at the height of the books’ popularity,
at the turn of the century, their exposure in the
general population was extensive. The Barna
Research Group conducted a study in May 2001
that provided some striking data. While the
survey was commissioned by Tyndale, and the
Barna group is known for its work in conserva¬
tive Christian circles, Barna nevertheless is an
independent firm that uses generally respected
methodologies. The study found that 24 per¬
cent of American adults were aware of the Left
Behind books, and 9 percent had read at least
one of the volumes.3 In other words, almost one-
tenth of the adult population in the United States
had read at least one of the Left Behind books. Public attention to the Fig. 8.1. Left Behind by Tim
LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins.
books continued to grow for at least a couple of years beyond the date
The readers of the Left
of the study, so later results undoubtedly would have been even higher. Behind series include not
only born-again Christians
The Harry Potter books admittedly have had much greater recogni¬
but also millions of Roman
tion and readership, but the Left Behind statistics would be the envy Catholics, mainline Prot¬
estants, members of other
of almost any other author or publisher. world religions, and those
Barnas research also found, not surprisingly, that readers of the who claim no religious affili¬
ation at all. Image used by
Left Behind books tended to be born-again Christians who attended permission of Tyndale House
nonmainline Protestant churches in the South and the West. Yet the Publishers.

study also revealed millions of readers who did not fit those catego¬
ries, including Catholics, mainline Protestants, and adherents of other
world religions or no religion at all. George Barna concluded that the
series “reached a larger unduplicated audience of non-believers than
most religious television and radio ministries draw through their
programs.”4 The Left Behind books successfully crossed over from a
predictable audience of conservative Christians to reach major por¬
tions of the general public in the United States.
214 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

What was the story line of the books that

The Rapture according interested so many people? It was based upon

to the Left Behind Series a particular view of the end-times that modern
When the Pan-Continental 747 was evangelicals call dispensational premillennialism,
finally within satellite communications or simply dispensationalism (discussed further in
range of the United States, Captain the following section). Essentially, it consists of a
Rayford Steele connected with an all¬ complicated series of events beginning with a rap¬
news radio outlet and learned the ture, an unexpected moment when all true Chris¬
far-reaching effects of the disappear¬ tians instantly and mysteriously disappear from
ance of people from every continent.
the face of the earth. Those who remain behind
Communications lines were jammed.
then experience a seven-year period of increasing
Medical, technical, and service peo¬
difficulties, war, and chaos, a period called the
ple were among the missing all over
tribulation, in which the Antichrist rises to prom¬
the world. Every civil service agency
inence, is indwelt by Satan, and persecutes all who
was on full emergency status, try¬
ing to handle the unending tragedies.
do not conform to his one-world government and
Rayford remembered the El-train religion. At the end of the seven years Jesus Christ
disaster in Chicago years before and then returns to earth in a glorious appearing to
how the hospitals and fire and police defeat Satan and to begin a thousand-year reign of
units brought everyone in to work. peace and harmony on earth, the millennium.
He could imagine that now, multiplied LaHaye and Jenkins wanted to imagine what
thousands of times. Even the news¬ it would be like to live through all of these events,
casters' voices were terror filled, as and they acknowledged that the story they created
much as they tried to mask it.
was fiction, with characters and specific incidents
—Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins,
they invented, but both creators insisted that the
Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth's
basic outline of the story was consistent with bib¬
Last Days (Wheaton, III.: Tyndale,
lical prophecy. Three major characters in the story
1995), 28-29.
were Rayford Steele, an airline pilot, Chloe Steele,
Rayfords adult daughter who emerges into lead¬
ership, and Cameron “Buck” Williams, a journalist. Within the first
twenty pages of the first book the rapture occurs. Several passengers
instantly disappear from Steeles plane in midair, leaving clothing and
even a hearing aid behind, and after some initial hysteria and confu¬
sion, many of the remaining people conclude that it was the rapture.
The entire plot of the twelve books, then, becomes the story of those
who were “left behind.” Some persons, including the three mentioned
above, take the rapture as a wake-up call, convert from nominal Chris¬
tianity to a born-again acceptance of Christ, and form a Tribulation
 Apocalypticism in the United States Forbes 215

Force to battle against evil. Nicolae Carpathia arises as the Antichrist,

initially with a deceptively charming demeanor (looking very much
like Robert Redford, the authors say), becoming secretary general of
the United Nations, and eventually inflicting oppression, violence, and
death upon the world. The novels are filled with dramatic struggles
and outright battles between good and evil, and part of the suspense of
the story is wondering which of the familiar cast of characters might
die next. (Many do.) The first half of the twelfth volume, Glorious
Appearing, is particularly filled with blood and gore as the climactic
finale approaches. When Jesus appears, one motion of his hand causes
an incredible chasm to open up, into which all unbelievers tumble
to hell, “howling and screeching,” and then the millennium begins.
Fans of the books found it to be a satisfying conclusion, while critics
objected to the image of Jesus as a warrior, and they also dissented
from the authors’ apparent certainty that all members of other world
religions, and many mainline Christians without a born-again experi¬
ence, will be consigned to hell.

FORMAL THEOLOGY
When most theologians and religious studies scholars seek to place
these novels into context, they usually discuss the history of doctrines
about millennialism and apocalyptic thought, which certainly have a
long tradition. In the words of historian Eugen Weber, “Apocalypse—
the revelation or unveiling of the world’s destiny and of mankind’s—
has fascinated Jews and their Christian offspring at least for the last
2200 years.”5
“Apocalypse,” from the Greek word apokalypsis, meaning “dis¬
closure,” “revelation,” or “unveiling,” refers to the revelation of divine
mysteries, generally about how things will turn out in the future, often
including punishment of one’s enemies and rewards for those who
were faithful. Historians note that apocalyptic thought tended to arise
when Jews or Christians faced difficulties, because the apocalyptic
visions promised that no matter how bleak things appeared to be,
God offered hope in the future. Thus, the Book of Daniel in the He¬
brew scriptures was written in a time of persecution, when traditional
216 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

Jewish culture seemed threatened by the imposi¬

Definitions of "Apocalyptic Literature," tion of Hellenistic values and customs, and the
"Apocalypticism" Revelation to John in the Christian New Testament
Certain portions of the Bible (includ¬ was written in a context of Roman persecution of
ing Daniel 7-12 and the book of early Christians. The following generalization is of
Revelation) are often categorized course oversimplified, but throughout the history
as apocalyptic literature, a genre or of Christianity apocalyptic literature tended to
type of Jewish literature that became
arise in eras when Christianity endured threats or
popular during the intertestamental
turmoil, and among smaller, marginalized Chris¬
period and extended into the [New
tian groups. When Christians enjoyed status or
Testament] era (c. 400 b.c. to a.d. 100).
power, they were likely to deemphasize apocalyp¬
The writers of apocalyptic literature
tic theology or treat it allegorically.
sought to disclose "heavenly secrets"
concerning how the world would end
The term “millennialism” arises from some
and how the kingdom of God would references in Revelation 20:2-7 in which John
suddenly appear to destroy the king¬ saw a vision of an angel who bound and threw
dom of evil. Apocalyptic writers made the Devil or Satan into a pit for a thousand years
extensive use of visions, dreams, and (a millennium), a period during which Christ
symbols as instruments of revealing and Christian martyrs reigned over the earth.
what was hidden. Apocalypticism has Millennialism is the strain of thought that looks
been variously defined as a social forward to an ideal time in the future when prob¬
movement or ideology arising out of
lems are resolved and life is perfect, under the
an oppressed subgroup in a society,
reign of Christ. Some Christians expect such a
whether ancient or modern, which in
thousand-year period to occur literally upon the
defining its identity seeks release from
earth, within human history, while others see it
oppression by seeing a future reality
more as symbolic language expressing hope about
as more important than the present
state of affairs.
the future. Sociologists have generalized the term
—Stanley J. Grenz, David Guretzki, “millennialism” to refer to religious movements
and Cherith Fee Nordling. Pocket even beyond Christianity, when any culture holds
Dictionary of Theological Terms religious beliefs about some kind of future deliver¬
(Downers Grove, III.: InterVarsity, ance to a better life, even if it does not involve a
1999), 12-13. thousand-year period. In that wider meaning, the
Ghost Dance among nineteenth-century Native
Americans might be called a millennial movement. Among all the
variations, the consistent motif is hope in the future.
There was an ebb and flow of millennial, apocalyptic thought
throughout the history of Christianity, but one period when it played
a major role was in the founding of European colonies in the New
 Apocalypticism in the United States | Forbes 217

World and in the development of the United States into a nation with
a sense of religious calling. Christopher Columbus himself wrote,
“God made me the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth
of which he spoke in the Apocalypse of St. John . . . and he showed
me where to find it.”6 New England Puritan beliefs that their colonial
experiment was part of God’s plan, American convictions that their
young nation was a New Israel, and later expressions of manifest des¬
tiny all were conveyed repeatedly in millennial language.
In the American context, it is helpful to distinguish between “pre-
millennialism,” “postmillennialism,” and “amillennialism,” because
they played contrasting roles in American history. The first two terms
refer to differing beliefs about whether Christs second coming would
occur before or after the millennium. Postmillennialism posits that
Christ’s return will come after the millennium, that it will be “post-
millennial.” In this view, positive developments on earth, including
conversions to Christianity and improvements in society, can help
prepare the way for Christ’s second coming. This perspective tends
to be optimistic about what can be accomplished on earth, motivat¬
ing Christians to spread the gospel and also to work for reform of
economic, social, political, and cultural aspects of life, believing that a
regeneration of human beings by the Holy Spirit can lead to a gradual
coming of God’s kingdom on earth, which would then be followed
by Christ’s second coming. This was the most common perspective
in much American Protestantism from colonial beginnings into the
twentieth century. An essay in the American Theological Review in
1859 referred to postmillennialism as the “commonly received doc¬
trine” among American Protestants.7
Premillennialism reverses the order, arguing that Christ’s second
coming will be “premillennial,” with Christ’s intervention causing
the sudden beginning of the millennium in dramatic fashion. This
perspective tends to be more pessimistic about what human beings
can accomplish, expecting life on earth to deteriorate into warfare,
immorality, and godlessness until Christ returns to set things right.
Historian Jeanne Halgren Kilde summarized premillennial beliefs in
this way: “No perfecting activities or good works could improve the
world or usher in the millennium. Individuals, replete with sin, had
only one hope of avoiding damnation: to convert to Christianity as
218 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

quickly as possible, before Christs imminent return. Thus, while post-

millennialists saw divine history as a process of improvement, these
premillennialists . . . saw history as a struggle between good and evil
in which human society was inherently corrupt and which only Christ
could resolve.”8
Premillennialism emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth cen¬
turies to become the predominant perspective among American
fundamentalist and evangelical Christians, but not among mainline
Protestants and Catholics. The viewpoint of the latter groups often is
labeled “amillennialism,” which interprets the millennium symboli¬
cally instead of as a literal thousand-year period to be expected at the
end of human history. Theologian Stanley Grenz notes that “from the
fourth century to the present, amillennialism in some form or another
has reigned as the quasi-official teaching of most mainline Christian
traditions, whether Orthodox, Roman Catholic, or Protestant.”9
Clearly the Left Behind books represent the premillennial per¬
spective. Within the premillennial camp there are many disagree¬
ments about the precise details of how the end-times will unfold, but
the theological view named earlier, dispensational premillennialism,
or simply dispensationalism, was the particular form of premillen¬
nialism that became dominant among American fundamentalists
Fig. 8.2. Portrait of John and evangelicals in the late nineteenth century and throughout the
Nelson Darby. Image cour¬
tesy of the National Portrait
twentieth century. Historians generally regard it as a fairly recent view
Gallery, London. in the history of Christianity, arising especially through the teachings
of John Nelson Darby (1800-1882). Darby, a former
Church of Ireland priest who was one of the founders
of the Plymouth Brethren, predicted a “secret rapture.”
Although earlier Christians may have had ideas about
Christians being lifted up into the air at a time of judg¬
ment (based especially upon 1 Thess. 4:16-17), Darby
helped give it a name not found in the Bible, a “rapture,”
and he separated the rapture from the final judgment
day as two distinct events. The entire dispensational
package of details combined together, including a rap¬
ture, a seven-year tribulation, the glorious appearing,
and then the millennium, had not appeared in Chris¬
tian theology prior to the nineteenth century, although
 Apocalypticism in the United States | Forbes 219

its advocates argue strongly that it is the proper understanding of bib¬

lical prophecy. In the United States these dispensational views became
part of a “Princeton theology” that advocated biblical inerrancy and
literal reading of the Bible, were expressed during the Niagara Bible
Conferences, and influenced the notes of the Scofield Reference Bible,
all of which were important in the emergence of American fundamen¬
talism. In the 1970s, the dispensational view spread further through
the popularity of Hal Lindseys The Late Great Planet Earth and
through an extensively viewed, low-budget Christian film, A Thief in
the Night.10 The Left Behind books built upon the influence of these
predecessors, extending dispensational views beyond conservative
Christians even further into the general public.
As the Left Behind series grew in popularity at the end of the
twentieth century, mainline Christians who held alternate views were
either unaware of the books or uninterested in responding, which left
a vacuum for LaHaye and Jenkins to fill. Mainline Christian leaders
belatedly realized that many members of their churches, Catholic and
Protestant, assumed that all Christians believed in a rapture and that
all Christians interpreted the Book of Revelation as a coded prediction
of literal future events. Only after the turn of the century did critiques
begin to appear, from Catholics Carl Olson (Will Catholics Be Left
Behind? A Critique of the Rapture and Today’s Prophecy Preachers) and
Paul Thigpen (The Rapture Trap: A Catholic Response to “End Times”
Fever), Lutheran Barbara Rossing (The Rapture Exposed: The Message
of Hope in the Book of Revelation), and Protestant evangelical Gary
DeMar (End Times Fiction: A Biblical Consideration of the Left Behind
Theology).11 The formal theological debate was joined in books writ¬
ten for general audiences and in radio, television, and church discus¬
sions. Supporters of the Left Behind books were pleased to advance
their perspectives, and critics argued for alternate biblical interpreta¬
tions and theological beliefs. The discussions also spilled into social
and political issues, because critics charged that the books were linked
with a George W. Bush foreign policy that was suspicious of global
cooperation and dismissive of the United Nations and that saw most
choices as black and white. In addition, critics asked, if one holds a
belief that only Christs return can change the inevitable deterioration
of the world, why would anyone work to alleviate poverty or protect
220 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

the environment? Historian Paul Boyer, whose book about prophecy

belief in modern America was published in the early 1990s, wrote in a
later article that “all of us would do well to pay attention to the beliefs
of the vast company of Americans who read the headlines and watch
the news through a filter of prophetic belief.”12

POPULAR THEOLOGY
The foregoing discussion is a summary of some of the terminology and
perspectives that historians and formal theologians would bring to an
analysis of the Left Behind books. They tend to focus on the influence
of the books: supporters of the Left Behind series were excited about
the possibilities for evangelization and conversion to what they saw as
proper belief that arose from the popularity of the novels, and critics
worried that the books were theologically misleading and socially and
politically dangerous. Yet a discussion of the influence of the books,
good or bad, does not address a further question. Why were the books
popular? Why did so many people in the general public respond
to them?
This is more than a question of idle curiosity, because the answer
may help us glimpse some aspects of the beliefs of “average” Ameri¬
cans. When analyzing popular culture, one of the most basic axioms
is that popular culture both influences us and reflects us. Assessments
of popular culture seem to focus most often upon how it shapes or
influences individuals and society. For example, does violence in the
mass media help create a violent society? If women are portrayed
consistently as victims or helpless bystanders in movies and television
programs, does this repeated pattern influence the way young women
envision themselves? Does television news coverage of events around
the world contribute to a heightened global awareness? Such ques¬
tions focus upon the influences of popular culture, whether evaluated
positively or negatively.
But examining what is popular has potential to tell us about soci¬
ety in another way. Popular culture also reflects us. Examining what is
popular is like holding up a mirror to see ourselves. The public decides
what movies, television shows, music, and clothing styles become
 Apocalypticism in the United States Forbes 221

popular, sometimes surprising the pundits. The

largest advertising budget does not necessarily American Politics
bring the best results, indicating that the general and Apocalypticism
public makes choices and cannot be seen as mere Academics do need to pay more
pawns of the creators or producers. Why does the attention to the role of religious belief
public make the choices it does? In part, what we in American public life, not only in the
choose must resonate in some way, thus reveal¬ past, but also today. Without close

ing our fears, hopes, yearnings, or assumptions. attention to the prophetic scenario
embraced by millions of American
Admittedly, it is a speculative task to figure out
citizens, the current political climate
what those are, but widespread patterns in popu¬
in the United States cannot be fully
lar culture can at least provide clues.
understood.
Two classic and frequently neglected books
Leaders have always invoked
provide a theoretical framework for recognizing
God's blessing on their wars, and, in
an unofficial belief system within the expressions this respect, the Bush administration is
of popular culture. The first is Yowr God Is Alive simply carrying on a familiar tradition.
and Well and Appearing in Popular Culture, pub¬ But when our born-again president
lished in 1976 by John Wiley Nelson, a theology describes the nation's foreign-policy
professor at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. objective in theological terms as a
He claimed that there exists, alongside the tradi¬ global struggle against "evildoers,"
tional religions that many people acknowledge, and when, in his recent State of the
an “American cultural religion.” “Functioning Union address, he casts Saddam

societies in their most stable periods of self¬ Hussein as a demonic, quasi-super¬

natural figure who could unleash "a
understanding and expression,” he wrote, “pro¬
day of horror like none we have ever
duce a single dominant set of values which unifies
known," he is not only playing upon
all the shared individual or small-group beliefs
our still-raw memories of 9/11. He is
into one characteristic belief system.” That domi¬
also invoking a powerful and ancient
nant set of values is the basis of an American apocalyptic vocabulary that for mil¬
cultural religion. This sounds a bit like the thesis lions of prophecy believers conveys
of Robert Bellah’s famous essay “Civil Religion a specific and thrilling message of an
in America,” written nine years earlier. But while approaching end—not just of Saddam,
Bellah focused mostly on the nations symbols but of human history as we know it.
and leaders, Nelson examined examples of cul¬ —Paul S. Boyer, "John Darby Meets
ture such as television, films, music, and popular Saddam Hussein: Foreign Policy and
literature as the expression and reaffirmation of Bible Prophecy," Chronicle of Higher

the American cultural belief system.13 Traditional Education 49, no. 23 (February 14,
2003): B12.
religious institutions are explicit in stating what
they believe and “in scheduling the ritual dramas
222 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

of reaffirmation, that is, the worship services. American cultural

religion is much less recognizably explicit, but no less powerfully
pervasive in our lives.” For Nelson, popular culture, such as watch¬
ing television in the family room of a suburban home, is the worship
experience for the American cultural religion.14
When Nelson attempted to discern a creed of basic beliefs in the
American cultural religion, he used a template of questions that obvi¬
ously arose from his own background in Christian theology. In each
example of popular culture, he asked:

• What was unsatisfactory about the present situation?

• What was its source (the nature and the source of evil)?
• What was the delivering force that defeated the evil?
• What would a resolved situation look like?
• What is “the way,” the path to follow in the interim?

The common answers to these questions, found in broad pat¬

terns of popular culture, would reveal the beliefs of the American
cultural religion. Interestingly enough, while Nelson considered many
examples of American popular culture in the twentieth century, he
gave special emphasis to the western. He called the American western
movie the “high mass” of the American cultural religion, because it
communicated society’s dominant belief system so effectively.
The second classic book, The American Monomyth, appeared only
a year after Nelsons. More recently, authors Robert Jewett and John
Shelton Lawrence published a substantially revised edition of the
work under a new title, The Myth of the American Superhero. Many
elements of their thesis were compatible with Nelsons views, but
their initial volume was essentially completed before the appearance
of Nelsons book, and they made no reference to his work. They dis¬
cussed a similar dominant pattern in popular culture but extended it
beyond the western.
Jewett and Lawrence were aware of Joseph Campbell’s studies of
myths, in which he found a single recurrent pattern in traditional
mythological story lines. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Camp¬
bell summarized the plot of the classical monomyth as follows: “A hero
ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of super-
 Apocalypticism in the United States Forbes 223

natural wonder: fabulous forces are there encoun¬

tered, and a decisive victory is won: the hero American Cultural Religion
comes back from this mysterious adventure with All religions offer a system of beliefs
the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”15 and values, but so does American
When Jewett and Lawrence surveyed American society. And the set of beliefs and

popular culture they became convinced that this values offered by American culture

plot did not describe most of what they saw. They are not beliefs and values to which we

could detect a common plot or story line, but it are converted. We grow up believing
that they are true. That's part of what it
was different from the classical one. They argued
means to be an American. In fact, we
that a distinctively American monomyth had
learn them so well that most of the time
emerged, and they summarized it in this way: “A
we are not even fully conscious that
community in a harmonious paradise is threat¬
we believe them. Every time we watch
ened by evil: normal institutions fail to contend
TV, read popular magazines or detec¬
with this threat: a selfless superhero emerges to tive fiction, listen to country music, go
renounce temptations and carry out the redemp¬ to the movies or professional sports
tive task: aided by fate, his decisive victory restores events, we are having these American
the community to its paradisal condition: the cultural beliefs and values reaffirmed.
superhero then recedes into obscurity.”16 This We are in fact attending worship ser¬

outline of the dominant plot in American popular vices of the American cultural religion

culture sounds very much like a western, and it is fifteen to twenty hours a week.

no surprise for Jewett and Lawrence, who traced —John Wiley Nelson, Your God
Is Alive and Well and Appearing
the American monomyth’s development through
in Popular Culture (Philadelphia:
Indian captivity narratives, pulp fiction, westerns,
Westminster, 1976), 16-17.
and comic book superheroes.
Jewett and Lawrence also noted the influ¬
ence of religion upon these story lines. While the classical mono¬
myth is essentially an initiation rite, the American monomyth is
a tale of redemption. The American monomyth “secularizes the
Judeo-Christian redemption dramas that have arisen on American
soil, combining elements from the selfless servant who impassively
gives his life for others and the zealous crusader who destroys evil.
The supersaviors in pop culture function as replacements for the
Christ figure, whose credibility was eroded by scientific rationalism.
But their superhuman abilities reflect a hope of divine, redemptive
powers that science has never eradicated from the popular mind.”17
Thus, in the back-and-forth interplay between popular culture and
organized religion (especially Christianity as the majority religion
224 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

in the United States), formal institutionalized

The Western as American Myth religion has helped shape the basic form of the
The dominant belief system in Amer¬ popular culture narrative, while popular culture
ican life has found a normative ritual in turn reaffirms, replaces, and revises aspects of
form of expression in "the Western." the religious assumptions.
In no other type of mythological drama While Nelson, Jewett, and Lawrence all
is this dominant American salvation
emphasize a singular dominant pattern in Ameri¬
myth more comprehensively fixed.
can popular culture, they also recognize that what
—John Wiley Nelson, Your God
is popular varies from subgroup to subgroup
Is Alive and Well and Appearing
(arising from gender, race, ethnicity, social class,
in Popular Culture (Philadelphia:
region, and more). In addition, various examples
Westminster, 1976), 16-17.
of popular culture intentionally spoof or seriously
critique the dominant patterns, attempting to
establish their own counterdominant traditions. However, even such
variety highlights the presence of an overarching common pattern of
pervasive beliefs and tendencies, as the alternative perspectives push
against it.

WESTERNS AND COMIC BOOKS

Throughout the twentieth century two patterns in American popular
culture have been especially prominent: the western and the comic
book superhero. Both have been pervasive and influential in the
shape of American popular culture. Both are redemption dramas.
Both express assumptions about the conflict between good and evil.
Both resolve the conflicts through violence. A brief discussion of
these two traditions should help demonstrate that the Left Behind
books stand as much within the context of these patterns of popular
culture as within a context of formal theology. Part of the reason
that the general public could embrace the Left Behind series is the
books’ reaffirmation of messages long preached by American popu¬
lar culture.
The western as a genre represents a long tradition in American
popular culture, from Indian captivity narratives to dime novels to
Buffalo Bills Wild West Show; in fiction ranging from James Feni-
more Cooper to Louis LAmour; in countless radio dramas, movies,
 Apocalypticism in the United States | Forbes 225

and television shows; even in the presi¬

dential styles of Teddy Roosevelt and
Ronald Reagan and the “New Frontier”
of John F. Kennedy. In 1902 what might
be considered the prototypical example
of western fiction was published: Owen
Wisters The Virginian, which sold more
than two million copies. By the middle
of the century westerns literally flooded
movie theatres and television screens.
The Virginian became a Gary Cooper
movie in 1929, and Shane, starring Alan
Ladd and Jack Palance, appeared in
1953. Both films are considered classics
of the western formula, representing
innumerable movies that appeared in
theaters from the 1930s through the
1970s. On television, westerns were
important from the beginning of the
medium in the 1940s and 1950s, reaching their peak in 1959, when Fig. 8.3. The immensely
popular 1953 movie Shane
twenty-six westerns aired in prime time. Many series from that time (with Alan Ladd and Brandon
and thereafter are legendary: Gunsmoke; The Lone Ranger; The Rifle¬ DeWilde, above) is a proto¬
typical example of the West¬
man; Wanted Dead or Alive; Have Gun, Will Travel; Rawhide; Bonanza; ern with its dramatic and
The Big Valley; Maverick; and more. often simplistic depiction of
the battle between good and
When looking for ways that popular culture either influences or evil. Photo © Underwood &
reflects society, the strategy is to examine common patterns rather Underwood/Corbis. Used by
permission.
than exceptional unique examples. Thus, it is helpful to analyze the
formula of the genre. In the case of the western, first of all the setting
is the frontier, “the meeting point between savagery and civilization.”
In the words of John Wiley Nelson, “here the untamed, often savage
wilderness makes its stand against the forces of law and order, who
fight for the farmer, the schoolmarm, and the future of us all.”18 And
the result is not in doubt, because everyone knows that the civilizing
forces will win. The western is a ritual drama that repeats over and
over that the mature, responsible, law-abiding forces will prevail. It is
in a sense an eschatological setting, at the border between good and
evil, with the result of the conflict already a foregone conclusion.
226 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

Regarding the characters in the drama, “the

The Popularity of Superheroes adversaries in the Western form are simplisti-
The characters [comic book superhe¬ cally good and evil foes.”19 In the classic western,
roes like Superman and Batman] are heroes and villains wore white hats and black
popular not only because they embody hats. The villain was such a chilling personifica¬
childhood dreams, but because they tion of evil, expressing sadistic cruelty with a
provide us a way of fulfilling funda¬ contemptuous sneer, that no force of kindness
mental human yearnings that we carry
would ever be able to transform him. The evil vil¬
with us no matter what our age.
lains came from the outside, such as the outlaw
—Jenette Kahn, Introduction to Les
gang that rode into town or the scheming banker
Daniels, DC Comics: Sixty Years of the
who represented corrupt politicians or heart¬
World's Favorite Comic Book Heroes
less absentee bosses. The threatened townspeople
(New York: Little, Brown, 1995), 12.
were basically innocent but helpless. The only
hope for deliverance came from the morally pure,
respectful, self-sacrificing hero who appeared
from elsewhere, destroyed the villains, reluctantly through violence,
and then usually departed.
Most people assume that a western necessarily takes place in the
American West of the 1800s. However, if the formula briefly outlined
here provides the basic criteria for a western, it might be possible to
claim that other stories beyond the American west are “westerns” too.
Thus, several commentators have called Star Wars a space western,
and John Wiley Nelson argued that the movie Casablanca was just
as much a western as Shane. In this view, James Bond movies and
numerous action adventure stories represent a continuation of the
western genre in settings beyond the American West.
The rise of westerns in American popular culture was followed by
comic books and their spandex superheroes, and their formula was
remarkably similar to the western. Superman was the breakthrough
character, created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, appearing for the
first time in the June 1938 issue of Action Comics. Superman provided
the model for most superheroes who followed, having amazing super
powers, a secret identity, and a dramatic costume with capes and flour¬
ishes. Comic historian Les Daniels wrote of Superman that he was “an
instant triumph, a concept so intense and so instantly identifiable
that he became perhaps the most widely known figure ever created in
American fiction.”20 Batman followed in 1939, along with Sandman,
 Apocalypticism in the United States | Forbes 227

Hawkman, and The Spirit. Flash, Green Lantern, The Shield, Captain
Marvel, and White Streak appeared in 1940, and Wonder Woman,
Captain America, Plastic Man, and Sub-Mariner came in 1941. It was
a flood of characters, or, as comic book fans call it, the Golden Age
of comics. Other “ages” followed, when Marvel Comics and Stan Lee
introduced superheroes like Spiderman and the Fantastic Four with
more personal struggles and foibles, and when some comic books
moved beyond the superhero genre. Yet the superhero comic books
retain a prominent role in American popular culture. Many who have
never touched a comic book have seen television shows or movies
based upon the genre.
In a comparison of superhero stories with the western formula, the
setting is still the frontier between good and evil, but when supervil¬
lains as well as superheroes serve as the antagonists, the battleground
is more cosmic. In the superhero stories frequently the nation, the
world, or the entire universe is threatened by evil, not merely a town.
Other characteristics are also present: the community is helpless in
the face of danger or evil and needs help from outside, the superhero
intervenes as a savior or deliverer, the characters tend to be simplisti-
cally good and evil, and in the end evil forces seldom are transformed.
Resolution comes instead through the destruction of evil characters,
or, when they are needed for sequels or continuing story lines, they
are at least vanquished temporarily. (One reason Jewett and Lawrence
personally are critical of this dominant narrative is that they believe
it undercuts democracy. If the townspeople always need an outside
deliverer, then they never take responsibility themselves, and after the
superhero defeats evil and leaves, the community is no better prepared
for the next threat than it was before.)
Over the years, comic book stories increasingly have used explic¬
itly mythological language and visual symbols, consciously recogniz¬
ing their religious connections. Perhaps the most dramatic example
came from Jack Kirby, who worked for decades with both DC and
Marvel comics, creating legendary characters and superhero teams.
In the 1970s, he invented an entire mythological universe eventually
dubbed the Fourth World, with comic book series titled “The New
Gods,” “The Forever People,” and “Mister Miracle.” The stories arose
from a planet blown in half, creating two new conflicting worlds: New
228 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

Genesis, led by the benevolent Highfather, and Apokolips, led by the

villain Darkseid. Beyond Kirby’s creations, other comic book series
carried titles like “Millennium” and “Zero Hour: Crisis in Time,” and
superheroes appeared in thinly disguised crucifixion poses on comic
book covers.21
Westerns and comic book stories also were decidedly male-domi¬
nated, both in the demographics of their audiences and in the gender
of the heroes, consistent with the patriarchal character of society and
churches throughout much of the twentieth century. Yet just as gender
emerged as an issue in society, it arose among comic book creators as
well. The classic example comes from psychologist William Moulton
Marston, best known for inventing the lie detector, who also published
an article critical of comic books. Among other complaints he wrote,
“It seemed to me, from a psychological angle, that the comics’ worst
offense was their blood-curdling masculinity.”22 An editor invited
Marston to write a comic book of his own, and Wonder Woman was
the very successful result, appearing in 1941-1942. While Marston
wanted to provide a role model for girls, others complained about
undertones of submission to men and even visual portrayals of bond¬
age. At a minimum, Wonder Woman at least helped bring discussion
of gender issues into the comic book world.
What religious messages or beliefs have the traditions of westerns
and comic books repeatedly affirmed? A compelling case can be made
for the presence of the following:

1. Evil comes from the outside. An external source of evil, such

as an outlaw gang or aliens from another planet, is psychologically
comforting for the public to accept, because it assures that “we” are
not the problem.
2. An outside redeemer brings deliverance. When the threat to
individuals or the community seems too overwhelming, the prospect
of a Clint Eastwood or a Superman brings hope where none seemed
otherwise possible. It also suggests that the community is incapable of
solving the problem.
3. People are good or evil, not both. The villains in a Lone Ranger
television show, a Batman comic book, or a James Bond movie are not
the kind of people one could expect to change their ways as the result
 Apocalypticism in the United States | Forbes 229

of a heart-to-heart conversation. Terrorist villains in more recent

action-adventure stories are also beyond redemption. People on both
sides may have foibles or deceptive charm, but at heart they are either
good or bad.
4. The solution is the destruction of evildoers. When the distinction
between good and bad people is clear-cut, and when bad people cannot
be changed, there is only one way to eliminate evil: kill the evildoers.
In how many action-adventure movies are the villains transformed to
a new way of living. (Very few.) How often do they die? (Most of the
time.) Situations are resolved through “redemptive violence.”23

Such assumptions or beliefs are at least a portion of the creed of

what John Wiley Nelson called the “American cultural religion.” The
apocalyptic fiction of LaHaye and Jenkins stands directly in the tradi¬
tion of the American monomyth, the dominant story line represented
by westerns, comic books, and more. The setting of the Left Behind
books is literally eschatological, on the frontier of good and evil; the
adversaries are simplistically good and evil foes; the evil comes from
the outside (the Antichrist, indwelt by Satan); humans are incapable
of resolving the situation; and deliverance must come from a savior
(in this case, Christ himself) through the righteous destruction of
evil and the evildoers. In addition, the Left Behind leaders are over¬
whelmingly male, although the roles of women are more complicated
than one might expect.24 The Left Behind books reaffirm every one of
the four beliefs or assumptions numbered above. In a sense, the Left
Behind books bring the discussion full circle, back to explicit religion,
because Jewett and Lawrence contended that the American mono¬
myth was basically a redemption drama rooted in Judeo-Christian
traditions that had been secularized.
Thus, even though it is relevant to analyze the Left Behind books
in light of formal Christian theology, such as the differences between
various Christian understandings of millennialism, it is equally
important to recognize that the books represent themes long repeated
and reaffirmed in American popular culture, throughout the twentieth
century. Seen in this context, the Left Behind books are yet another
Arnold Schwarzenegger or Indiana Jones movie, with explicit religious
imagery added. Because many of the Left Behind messages resonate so
230 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

well with a pervasive unofficial, informal theology revealed in popu¬

lar culture, they lead us to consider what many ordinary Americans
believe, within the Christian church and beyond it.
Various Christian leaders may be disturbed by the four beliefs
outlined above, wanting to argue instead that human beings are
mixed, simultaneously saints and sinners, and that humans might be
transformed, not just condemned and destroyed. Critics also may be
dismayed by the advocacy of violence in the name of God. The point
here is that the Left Behind books did not originate these debated
themes, which are deeply embedded American assumptions and
beliefs revealed and reaffirmed in long traditions of American popular
culture.

FOR FURTHER READING

Boyer, Paul. When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Forbes, Bruce David, and Jeanne Halgren Kilde, eds. Rapture, Revelation, and the End
Times: Exploring the Left Behind Series. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Frykholm, Amy Johnson. Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Jewett, Robert, and John Shelton Lawrence. Captain America and the Crusade against
Evil: The Dilemma of Zealous Nationalism. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003.
Lawrence, John Shelton, and Robert Jewett. The Myth of the American Superhero. Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002.
Nelson, John Wiley. Your God Is Alive and Well and Appearing in Popular Culture. Phila¬
delphia: Westminster, 1976.
Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century
America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998.
Weber, Eugen. Apocalypses: Prophecies, Cults, and Millennial Beliefs through the Ages.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.
CATHOLICS
IN CHINA

JEAN-PAUL WIEST
CHAPTER NINE

he situation of the Catholic Church in China at the very end of the

_L twentieth century was complex and constantly evolving A The most
common view of the church highlights two extremes: the church that
is recognized by the government, and the underground church that is
in hiding. In fact, increasing numbers of Catholic believers belong to
a large gray area between these two. The government-recognized part
of the Catholic Church functions openly in churches registered with
the government and is linked to the Zhongguo Tianzhujiao Aiguohui,
or Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association (CCPA). It is therefore often
referred to as guanfang (or gongkai) jiaohui, the open church. The other
extreme, often referred to as dixia jiaohui, the underground church,
refuses any control by the CCPA and usually operates in private homes
or buildings without seeking government approval.
There are no perfect terms to identify these two clearly distinct
manifestations of the Catholic Church in China. I would recommend
avoiding labels such as “patriotic church” to describe the government-
recognized segment of the church because it implies either that all its
members wholeheartedly support the CCPA or that the underground
church is not patriotic minded, neither of which is true. Likewise, the
names “suffering church” and “loyal church” to describe the under¬
ground segment of the church are wrong and divisive, as they falsely
imply that the government-recognized church has not suffered or is
not loyal to the pope.
Chinese Catholics all love their country. Their moral values and
habits of hard work make them model citizens. In this sense they are

’This chapter was originally published as “Catholics in China: The Bumpy Road toward Reconciliation” by Jean-Paul
Wiest. Reprinted from the International Bulletin of Missionary Research, January 2003, by permission of the Overseas 231
Ministries Study Center, New Haven, Conn. For details, visit www.InternationalBulletin.org.
232 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

clearly patriotic. The vast majority worship openly or would like to,
provided they would not be controlled by the CCPA. Many, even in
the government-recognized churches, remain suspicious of the CCPA
and would like to see it disappear.
In this chapter, then, I view the Catholic Church in China as
one church, not as two (one faithful to Rome versus one that is not).
It is certainly a wounded church, but the division did not lead to
the formation of a schismatic church because the difference never
amounted to a doctrinal deviation or a total breach of communion
with the worldwide Roman Catholic Church. The Holy See has never
issued a formal declaration of a Chinese schism, nor has it explicitly
excommunicated any “patriotic” bishop.1 In fact, there are increas¬
ingly hopeful signs that healing between the different groups is in the
making, though the road toward reconciliation has recently included
some unpleasant bumps.

GOVERNMENT-RECOGNIZED SEGMENT
The roots of the division between the two parts of the Chinese Catholic
Church can be traced to the emergence of the CCPA in 1957. Formed
on the model of the Sanzhi Aiguo Yundong, or Three-Self Patriotic
Movement—a Protestant group organized in 1954 under the control
of the government to force the churches to break their economic and
political ties with the West and become thoroughly self-governing,
self-supporting, and self-propagating—the CCPA was to serve as a
bridge between the church and the state.
By late 1957, because of the prior expulsion of foreign bishops and
the subsequent imprisonment of Chinese prelates who opposed the
regime or rejected the CCPA, 120 out of 145 dioceses and prefectures
apostolic were without ordinaries. The clergy in several districts con¬
sidered filling the vacancies a real apostolic need and, at the urging of
their local CCPA branch, began the process of choosing a new bishop.
After electing a candidate each, the Dioceses of Wuchang and the
Wuhan in Hubei Province telegraphed the names to the Holy See for
the popes approval. The Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith
turned down their requests, however, because it saw these selections
 Catholics in China | Wiest 233

of bishops by the Chinese as an attempt to put in place “patriotic”

ordinaries who would simply carry out the Communist government
policy.
There is no doubt that the Chinese government was, and still is,
trying to exercise a large measure of control over the church. In all
fairness, however, one must also acknowledge that the requests came
from a Chinese clergy who, in the midst of intense pressures, still
acknowledged the pope’s privilege to appoint bishops. Only when their
plea was rejected did they decide to proceed anyway, on the ground
that the Holy See had failed to realize the difficulty of their situation.
On April 13, 1958, “patriotic” bishop Li Daonan of the neighboring
Diocese of Puqi performed the consecration of the two bishops in the
Hankou cathedral. Thus began the ordinations of bishops sponsored
by the CCPA but not recognized by the pope. In church parlance, such
bishops are “illegitimate.” In canonical terms, however, their consecra¬
tion, although “illicit,” remains perfectly valid.
Saddened by the news of the consecration of the two new bish¬
ops, Pope Pius XII issued the encyclical Ad apostolorum principis, in
which he expressed his disapproval of the CCPA and reiterated that
the authority for making episcopal appointments was his alone. Not
unexpectedly, the Chinese government reacted by forbidding church
authorities to have any further contact with the Vatican. A question
was even inserted in the ritual of episcopal ordination that made new
bishops-elect promise to “be detached from all control of the Roman
Curia.” The intention of the question, as explained by a “patriotic”
bishop, was not to reject papal authority but to object to the Vatican’s
rejection of Chinese-elected episcopal candidates.2 Bishops, priests,
sisters, and laypeople who refused to go along with the government
and the CCPA stance were sent to jail or labor camps. In 1958, prayer
for the pope was removed from the public prayers of the church. By
1962, the number of “patriotic” bishops had reached forty-two, while
those formerly appointed by Rome had fallen to about twenty.
The division between the two groups became fully apparent only
after the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), during which
all public religious activities ceased and all church properties were
confiscated. By 1979, clergy were allowed to return to their dioceses.
The new policy of the government allowed them to function in
234 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

public, rather than in hiding, and many began doing so. With fewer
than thirty bishops still alive, some prelates who had been imprisoned
for their unswerving loyalty to the pope and had refused any relation¬
ship with the CCPA were now more willing to cooperate with the
association for the future of the Catholic Church in China.
After 1981, the requirement to swear independence from Rome
was dropped, which resulted in more priests willing to accept episco¬
pal ordination. In addition, several of the “illicit” bishops have secretly
obtained legitimization of their status from the pope. Some even
actively sought higher positions within the CCPA in order to influ¬
ence its decisions and curb its tendency toward unilateral control.
In late May 1980, more than two hundred delegates representing
the government-registered Catholic Church gathered in Beijing to
attend the Third National Convention of the CCPA and the National
Catholic Representatives Assembly. These two meetings resulted in a
major reorganization of structures within the open church with the
creation of two additional national organizations: the Chinese Catho¬
lic Church Administrative Commission and the Chinese Catholic
Bishops’ Conference. From this point forward, the CCPA relinquished
its role as overseer of all church concerns, relegating itself to external
affairs and church-state relations. Responsibility for doctrinal and
pastoral affairs was given over to the clergy and church leaders. In
1992, further reorganization placed the Bishops’ Conference on an
equal footing with the CCPA while reducing the Church Administra¬
tive Commission to a committee responsible for pastoral affairs under
the control of the Bishops’ Conference. Five additional committees
were also set up to oversee seminary education, liturgy, theological
study, finance development, and international relationships. Initia¬
tives in the areas of pastoral work, training of clergy, and the social
apostolate of the church indicate that the new structures have been
effectively implemented.
With many ups and downs, the open church’s attitude toward
papal primacy has gradually improved. The prayer for the pope was
reintroduced into the Collection of Important Prayers in 1982. In
February 1989, the government allowed spiritual affiliation with the
Holy See, and in April of the same year the new Bishops’ Conference
promptly acknowledged the pope as the spiritual leader of the Chi-
 Catholics in China | Wiest 235

nese church. By the end of the decade, most congregations had also
restored the prayer for the pope during Mass.

UNDERGROUND SEGMENT OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

Many clergy released at the end of the Cultural Revolution were still
unwilling to join any Catholic organization registered with the gov¬
ernment. They refused to live at a church with other priests who had
married, betrayed others, or publicly denied the primacy of the pope.
They therefore carried out religious activities in private and gradually
attracted a great number of Catholics to join with them. Bishop Fan
Xueyan of the Diocese of Baoding in Hebei Province was released in
1979 and acted as the leader of the underground church. Recogniz¬
ing the urgent need for bishops in several dioceses, he ordained three
bishops in 1981 without first securing approval from the government
or the open church. When the pope learned of the circumstances
that prompted such a procedure, he legitimized the new bishops
and granted them and Bishop Fan special faculties to ordain suc¬
cessors as well as bishops for vacant seats of neighboring dioceses.
By 1989, the underground church had more than fifty bishops, who
in November of that year set up their own episcopal conference.
Rome also gave underground bishops the authority to ordain priests Fig. 9.1. Catholics in Shaanxi
without the required lengthy seminary training. This concession has ^"SS/Agence^VU.
accounted for the overall poor theological instruction of priests in the Used by permission
underground church. Moreover,
signs of excess and lack of coor¬
dination have appeared, with
some dioceses having as many
as three bishops claiming to be
the legitimate ordinary.
Since 1989 the underground
church has been the target of
mounting pressure from the
government. The same gov¬
ernment document of Febru¬
ary 1989 that recognized the
236 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

spiritual leadership of the pope also spelled out how to deal with the
underground church. Communist cadres were asked to differentiate
between underground forces that clung to their hostility and stirred
up believers and those who did not join the open church because of
their faith in the pope. The former, said the document, must be dealt
with severely, while patience should be used with the others. Accord¬
ingly, the government regarded the setting up of an episcopal con¬
ference by the clandestine bishops as a provocation. This evaluation
resulted in the arrest of several leaders, including Bishop Fan. At the
local level the implementation of that policy has remained vague and
vacillating, resulting in sporadic destruction of unregistered religious
buildings, temporary detention, and the levy of heavy fines. Since
the ban of the Falung Gong in July 1999, however, repressive mea¬
sures against Catholic communities not officially registered have also
greatly increased. Several priests and bishops remain in prison or have
had their activities curtailed.
Many underground Catholics play a prophetic role by their refusal
to participate in a government-sanctioned organization. They dare to
challenge the government policy regarding human rights and freedom
of religion from a Catholic standpoint.

RECONCILIATION IN THE MAKING

The bitter division has pitted those who choose to worship under the
supervision of the government against those who refuse to do so. Dur¬
ing the past twenty years the two sides have gradually moved away
from mistrust and bitter accusations to an attitude of understanding
respect and to concrete acts of cooperation and genuine efforts at rec¬
onciliation. The dividing lines between the two are becoming increas¬
ingly blurred. Fidelity to the Floly See has become less of an issue,
since the pope has legitimized most of the bishops in the open church,
and a number of new ones are being ordained with his approval.
For an ever-growing number of clergy, sisters, and ordinary
Christians, the division does not make much sense anymore. In a
courageous and prophetic manner many act as bridges between the
two sides of the church, and the late Pope John Paul II made repeated
 Catholics in China I Wiest 237

pleas to the Catholics of China to display toward one another “a love

which consists of understanding, respect, forbearance, forgiveness
and reconciliation.”3
The more serious reconciliation issue involves the still-unresolved
tensions between the Peoples Republic of China and the Vatican.
Informal talks between the two sides about the normalization of dip¬
lomatic relations have taken place intermittently since the late 1980s.
Beijing realizes that it has much to gain from restoring such ties but
insists on two main points: Rome must first sever its relations with
Taiwan, and it must not interfere with the election of Chinese bishops.
The Vatican sees diplomatic normalization as leading to greater free¬
dom for the church and to possibilities for a solid implantation.
Church officials have indicated that they are ready to establish
relations with Beijing, but first an agreement must be reached over the
Holy Sees relationship with Chinese Catholics. In late 1999, the news
spread that both sides had made substantial progress toward bridging
the gap between Beijing’s demand for a total and complete indepen¬
dence of the Chinese church and Romes insistence on an autono¬
mous Chinese church in communion with the pope and the universal
church. But during the course of the year 2000, two events—the ordi¬
nations of bishops without papal mandate on January 6 and Romes
October 1 canonization of 120 martyrs who died in China—seriously
undermined the process. These misunderstandings point to the dis¬
tance that still separates the Holy See and the Chinese government.

AN OFFENSE TO ROME:
N0NAPPR0VED ORDINATIONS
The ordination on January 6, 2000, of five bishops approved by the
CCPA but not approved previously by Rome represents a major
source of contention between China and the Holy See. Canon Law 377
states clearly that “the Supreme Pontiff freely appoints Bishops or con¬
firms those lawfully elected.” The Vatican thus refuses to sanction any
bishop named independently by Chinese or any other civil authority,
while Beijing, in defiance of church law, claims the right (since 1958)
to appoint bishops.
238 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

Circumstances surrounding this

ordination, however, point clearly to a
rift within the open church. We know
now that original plans called for an even
larger ordination ceremony, but several
open church bishops disapproved and
refused to attend the ceremony, as did
the teachers and seminarians of the
national seminary in Beijing. Accord¬
ingly, all but five ordinands bowed out
of the ceremony. These five, however,
Fig. 9.2. Catholic ceremony felt the pressure of the government and the national CCPA to be
in Shaanxi Province, 1994.
Photo © Yang Yankang /
ordained without seeking prior papal approval. This incident shows
Agence VU. Used by clearly that the prevailing mood within the open church inclines
permission
toward full support of existing church laws. Repressive measures from
the government have been unable to reverse the trend.
How the Vatican chooses bishops in China remains a problem, but
not an insoluble one. A likely compromise is for the Vatican to choose
bishops in consultation with the Chinese government. No agreement
can be reached, however, until the two sides resume dialogue.

AN OFFENSE TO BEIJING:
CANONIZATION OF MARTYRS
On October 1, 2000, as a proud China celebrated the fifty-first anni¬
versary of its founding as a republic, the worldwide Roman Catholic
Church proclaimed as saints 120 Catholics who died on Chinese soil,
86 of them during the Boxer Uprising in 1900. The timing of this
canonization resulted in a bitter exchange of words between the two
parties that once again derailed precarious efforts toward reestablish¬
ing diplomatic relations.
The history of turbulent relations between China and the Roman
Catholic Church is littered with elements of cultural disparity; in this
instance the problem centers on the meaning attached to dates. For
Chinese people, October has a special meaning. On October 18, 1860,
British and French troops burned down the magnificent summer pal-
 Catholics in China I Wiest 239

ace resort known as the Yuanming Yuan. Forty years later, precisely
during this same month of October, another rampaging foreign force
was in the midst of pillaging the capital. By contrast, October 10, 1911
(the Wuchang Uprising against the Qing Dynasty, the beginning of
the overthrow of the imperial regime), and October 1, 1949 (the birth
of the republic), stand as symbols of the indomitable spirit of the Chi¬
nese people and their resolve to forge their own destiny.
October is likewise a unique month for Roman Catholic devotion.
First, it is the month of Our Lady of the Rosary, a designation based on
a key naval battle at Lepanto, Greece, on October 7,1571, when Chris¬
tian forces defeated Ottoman Muslims. Western missionaries brought
to China the cult of Mary and the recitation of the Rosary, so much so
that in some parts of Hebei, Catholics are known as Old Rosary Say¬
ers. Today, the two most common pictures found in Catholic churches
and homes are still those of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Virgin
Mary, and the most popular form of devotion remains the prayers
of the Rosary. October is also referred to as Mission Month because
special emphasis is put on reminding Catholic faithful of their respon¬
sibility to ensure that Christian belief is spread to the entire world. The
month opens with the feast of St. Theresa of the Holy Child, patron
saint of missions, who spent her life praying for the conversion of non-
Christians. Chinese Catholics have a great devotion to St. Theresa,
with whom they readily identify because, not being allowed to preach
the gospel openly, they too rely on the power of prayer.
Each October, the third or fourth Sunday is set aside as Mission
Sunday to promote mission awareness among the faithful and to
secure funding for the missionary enterprise. Since it was established
in 1926, Mission Sunday has been closely related to China because it
was on October 28, 1926, that the first six Chinese bishops of modern
times were ordained by Pope Pius XI. Mission Sunday is emphasized
by a papal message that always pays special tribute to those who died
a violent death because of their faith. In 2000, John Paul II opened
Mission Month with the canonization of 120 martyrs who died in
China. What prompted the decision was the fact that close to three-
fourths of the people added to the list of saints were killed by the
Boxers exactly a hundred years earlier. Rome acknowledged that the
canonization had been postponed several times in the past because
240 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

it was a “highly sensitive question.” Yet it went ahead in 2000, insist¬

ing that the decision was “a purely religious matter” with no political
overtone. It simply “rendered justice to the historical reality” of 30,000
innocent people killed by “Boxer rebels.”
Pointing to another historical reality, Beijing, for its part,
denounced the event as a painful reminder of how, until recently, mis¬
sionaries and Chinese converts had been agents and lackeys of colo¬
nialist and imperialist nations. It called the canonization ceremony of
October 1 an “open insult” to the Chinese people, who on that same
day celebrated the fifty-first anniversary of their throwing off foreign
control and aggression. In stark contrast to this response, when a few
months earlier the Russian Orthodox Church canonized 222 Chinese
Orthodox martyrs, the Chinese government did not raise any criti¬
cism. Many of these Christians were killed during the nights of June
11 and 24, 1900, during the same Boxer Uprising.
On October 24, 2001, a year after the canonization dispute, the
pope acknowledged that historically members of the church had had
to work within the context of “complex historical events and conflict¬
ing political interests,” and that their work “was not always without
errors.” These errors, the pope said, “may have given the impression
of a lack of esteem for the Chinese people on the part of the Catholic
Church, making them feel that the church was motivated by feel¬
ings of hostility towards China. For all this I ask forgiveness and
understanding of those who may have felt hurt in some way by such
actions on the part of Christians.” But this response was not enough
for China. On October 30 a Chinese spokesperson, although viewing
the apology as “a positive move,” said that the pope had “not made a
clear-cut apology for the canonization incident, which seriously hurt
the feelings of the Chinese people.”4

LOOKING FORWARD TO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

In 1950, China had a Catholic population of about three million,
with 1,900 Chinese priests and 3,700 Chinese sisters. In 1980, it was
estimated that fewer than 1,300 elderly Chinese priests were actively
engaged in ministry. The situation of Chinese sisters was even more
discouraging: by 1980 just over 1,000 remained. Obviously the
 Catholics in China | Wiest 241

training of new church leaders and the

reopening of seminaries and novitiates
were most urgent priorities. Sheshan
Regional Seminary near Shanghai was
the first Catholic house of formation to
reopen in 1982.
At the turn of the twenty-first cen¬
tury, twenty-four major seminaries were
allowed to operate with government
permission, and another ten existed in
the underground church. Altogether
they prepared 1,700 seminarians. Sisters
in formation totaled 2,500, spread over
forty novitiates in the open church and
twenty in the underground. With a total
of 2,200 priests and 3,600 sisters, the
number of religious workers seemed to
be on the rebound. Churches and cha¬
pels reopened for public worship with
government approval had multiplied
and stood at 5,500. The Catholic Church
population was estimated at more than
twelve million, a rate of growth that had
only kept up with the population growth since 1949. By comparison, Fig. 9.2. Catholic woman in
Shaanxi Province, 1998.
Chinese Protestants displayed much more vitality by growing from
Photo © Yang Yankang/
less than three million to at least twenty-five million members, or Agence VU. Used by
twice the population growth. Factors behind the relatively slow permisslon
growth of the Catholic Church are many and complex, and certainly
include the bitter inner dispute that has been so divisive.
The Catholic Church’s educational activities came to an abrupt
end in the 1950s. Private schools reemerged in the early 1980s under
the impetus of Deng Xiaoping, but the government has made a clear
distinction between private schools as houses of religious formation
and training and private schools as alternative options within the
public education system. While the five recognized religions (Taoism,
Buddhism, Islam, Protestantism, and Catholicism) are permitted to
open the former under certain conditions, they are barred from any
involvement in public education.
242 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

Yet in a country where church educational activities remain

drastically curtailed, Catholic publishing houses such as Sapientia
Press in Beijing, Guangqi Press in Shanghai, and Hebei Faith Press
in Shijiazhuang, together with the Protestant Amity Press in Nanjing,
are important means for reaching and educating a great number of
Christian and non-Christian Chinese. They publish Bibles, Christian
literature, and journals and have also reprinted in simplified charac¬
ters many of the Chinese translations arriving in recent years from
Taiwan and Hong Kong, such as the documents of Vatican II, the
liturgy of the Mass, the new code of canon law, and the new univer¬
sal catechism. Unfortunately, except for Zhongguo Tianzhujiao (The
Catholic Church in China), the official journal of the CCPA, church
publications remain subject to the government censor and may legally
be sold only on church premises or through mail order.
The Hebei Faith Press also publishes a biweekly newspaper called
Xinde (Faith). In spite of the restriction just mentioned, it has a distri¬
bution of forty-five thousand copies throughout most of the provinces
of China, which amounts to a readership of over half a million people
in the underground and the open Catholic Church, as well as among
non-Christians. Besides relaying news of the church within and out¬
side China, the newspaper also encourages readers to act responsively
by sending funds for various charitable causes and major catastrophes.
Responses have been so enthusiastic that they have led to the estab¬
lishment of Beifang Jinde (Progress), a Catholic social service center
formed to handle donations for charity work in society.
Some outside organizations foster a confrontational and adver¬
sarial position on the situation of the Chinese church. Such groups,
however, are in direct defiance of the pope’s pleas for understanding,
forgiveness, reconciliation, and unity among Chinese Catholics. The
Chinese Catholic Church today is quite different even from what it
was in the 1980s, when it emerged from long years of repression. It
is growing in numbers, enjoying relative freedom of worship, and
experiencing a renewal of vocations to the priesthood and religious
life. At the same time, Chinese society is undergoing profound social
and economic changes. This transformation is confronting the church
with new issues and challenges as it begins to shed its ghetto mental¬
ity and to fulfill a more meaningful role for various segments of the
society.
 Catholics in China | Wiest 243

EPILOGUE
Pope Benedict XVI sent a letter to Chinese Catholics on Pentecost
Sunday 2007.5 It may signal a point of no return at several levels: first
within the Chinese Catholic Church itself; second, in the dialogue
between the Chinese government and the Vatican; and third, in rela¬
tions between the government and the Chinese Catholic Church.
Concerned above all with the unity of the Roman Catholic
Church, Benedict XVI speaks not of the “official church” and the
“underground church” but only of the “Church which is in China.” He
offers all Chinese Catholics an invitation to pardon and reconcilia¬
tion: “the purification of memory, the pardoning of wrong-doers, the
forgetting of injustices suffered and the loving restoration of serenity
require moving beyond personal positions or viewpoints. These are
urgent steps that must be taken to signify authentic bonds of com¬
munion with the local Church and with the universal Church.” The
pope also gives a clear answer to burning questions that have divided
the Chinese Church internally for twenty years. For instance, the
Eucharist celebrated by priests and bishops who are both in commu¬
nion with the pope and recognized by the civil authorities is valid, and
so are also all the other sacraments they administer.
In his letter the pope addresses not only Chinese Catholics but
also government authorities. He invites them to dialogue that would
transcend misunderstanding and incomprehension and make way for
new forms of communication and collaboration for the good of the
Chinese people and for peace in the world. He assures them that he is
not a political authority and that the mission of the Church in China
is to proclaim Christ, not to change the internal structure of the state.
The Church invites Catholics, he assures civil authorities, to be good
citizens who contribute respectfully and actively to the common good.
Likewise the Church expects the state to guarantee Catholic citizens
the full exercise of their faith and not to interfere in matters of faith
and discipline.
While offering an olive branch of peace, the pope also states
clearly where no compromise is possible. Without naming it specifi¬
cally, the pope denounces the Patriotic Associations claim to place its
members above the bishops and to guide the church community,
particularly condemning its declared purpose to foster independence
244 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

and autonomy, self-management, and democratic administration of

the Church.
To the Chinese Church the letter gives the pastoral directives it
greatly needs to overcome its division and achieve reconciliation To
the civil authorities, it brings a new offer of dialogue based on mutual
respect and deeper understanding. On December 18, 2007, during a
study session of the entire Polit Bureau on religion, Chinas president
Hu Jintao spoke of religions role in the construction of a harmonious
society and of the necessity for the communist party to take that into
account. Time will tell of the full impact of the popes letter, particu¬
larly on the ordinary Catholics of China, but its historical significance
seems already certain.

FOR FURTHER READING

Chan, Kim-Kwong. Towards a Contextual Ecclesiology: The Catholic Church in the
Peoples Republic of China (1979-1983), Its Life and Theological Implications. Hong
Kong: Chinese Church Research Center, 1987.
Kindopp, Jason, and Carol Lee Hamrin. God and Caesar in China: Policy Implications of
Church-State Tensions. Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 2004.
Lam, Anthony S.K. The Catholic Church in Present-Day China: Through Darkness and
Light. Hong Kong: The Holy Spirit Centre, 1997.
Lambert, Tony. Chinas Christian Millions: The Costly Revival. Grand Rapids: Kregel,
2000.
Lee, Joseph Tse-Hei. “Christianity in Contemporary China: An Update”. Journal of State
and Church 49, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 277-304.
Leung, Beatrice, and William R. Liu. The Chinese Church in Conflict: 1949-2001. Boca
Raton, FL: Universal, 2004.
Lozada, Eriberto P„ Jr., God Aboveground: Catholic Church, Postsocialist State, and
Transnational Processes in a Chinese Village. Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2001.
Madsen, Richard. Chinas Catholics: Tragedy and Hope in an Emerging Civil Society.
Comparative Studies in Religion and Society 12. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1998.
Minter, Adam. “Keeping Faith”. The Atlantic, July/August 2007. See website, http://www
.theatlantic.com/doc/200707/chinese-bishop.
Mooney, Paul. “Faith in the Countryside: Catholics in China.” National Catholic
Reporter 42, no. 10 (January 6, 2006): 12-13.
Tang, Edmond, and Jean-Paul Wiest. The Catholic Church in Modern China: Perspec¬
tives. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1993.
EXISTENTIAL RITUALIZING
IN POSTMODERN SWEDEN

VALERIE DEMARINIS
CHAPTER TEN

Living in and being myself a product of the country that is considered the
most secularized in the world, does not mean that spiritual questions or
questions about existence are not important. In fact, they may be even more
so here because everything is so private around this topic.... However, what
we really need in Sweden are safe places where people can go and maybe new
kinds of groups they can join so that they can feel they belong somewhere and
get renewed. This in my opinion is the function of a “sacred place” today. In
my medical office I can provide support, information, treatment, and medica¬
tion, but I cannot and should not try to provide a community of comfort and
caring. That is outside my responsibility and competency. How to build such
safe and sacred places is another question. I only know the need for such is
very great.
—A consulting psychiatrist in urban Sweden1

T he primary religious response to secularism in postmodern

Sweden is what I call “existential ritualizing.” My approach to
the subject matter here is shaped by my research in the psychology
of religion as informed by cultural and health psychology. The cen¬
tral focus in this approach is trying to grasp how people are creating
existential meaning in their lives, where in this process difficulties are
occurring, and how the problems are addressed. The term “existen¬
tial” is used here as an umbrella term for the different expressions of
meaning-making that may include or exclude a specific transcendent
aspect, or may combine elements of different belief traditions. It is a

245
246 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

functional orientation using a wide filter, with the intention of catch¬

ing the many-faceted dimensions of how people are struggling to
make existential meaning in this cultural context. The term implies
what an individual or group considers to be of ultimate concern,
what would commonly be included under the term “spiritual” in
English-speaking countries as interpreted with a wide lens. The term
“ritualizing” is used here to mean special actions that have a symbolic
value for the person involved. When combined with the adjective
“existential,” ritualizing refers to meaning-making actions that help
the person or group feel connected to the source of life, however that
is imaged. The term “postmodern” describes the perspective on the
nature of things and how they are to be approached. This vantage
point is one of choice, which stands for critical questioning, innova¬
tion, confrontation of absolutes, and the necessity of raising suspi¬
cions. In reality, however, this situation of choice in the extreme can
become a burden leading to an inability to find existential meaning
and identity.2

SWEDISH VALUES
Data from the World Values Surveys and the European Values Sur¬
veys, measuring the beliefs and values of most of the world’s peoples,
have been collected at intervals after the initial study in 1981. Factor
analysis of national-level data from the forty-three societies included
in the 1990 World Values Survey and supported by the 1995 and
2000 waves, from eighty societies, identified two main dimensions
that account for more than half of the cross-national variance in
more than a score of variables that tap into basic values across a wide
range of domains, including politics, economic life, sexual behavior,
and religion. The first is the Traditional/Secular-Rational dimen¬
sion, which reflects the contrast between the relatively religious and
traditional values that most often prevail in agrarian societies and
the relatively secular, bureaucratic, and rational values that most
often prevail in urban, industrialized societies. “Traditional societies
emphasize the importance of religion, deference to authority, parent-
Existential Ritualizing in Postmodern Sweden | DeMarinis 247

child ties and two-parent traditional families, and absolute moral

standards; they reject divorce, abortion, euthanasia, and suicide,
and tend to be patriotic and nationalistic. In contrast, societies with
secular-rational values display the opposite preferences on all of these
topics.”3 Thus Sweden, scoring high on the Secular-Rational dimension,
places less importance on organized religion, has a large percent
of the population living together though not married, respects the
rights of children, and permits both divorce and abortion. Euthana¬
sia and suicide are not permitted, though the rate of suicide is high.
Though proud of being Swedish, ethnic Swedes generally are not
nationalistic.
The second dimension is that of Survival/Self-Expression. Societ¬
ies ranking high on Survival values tend to emphasize “materialistic
orientations and traditional gender roles; they are relatively intolerant
of foreigners, gays and lesbians and other out-groups, show relatively
low levels of subjective well-being, rank relatively low on interper¬
sonal trust, and emphasize hard work, rather than imagination or tol¬
erance, as important things to teach a child. Societies that emphasize
Self-Expression values display the opposite preferences on all of these
topics.”4 Ranking high on the Self-Expression dimension, Sweden is
well-known for its generous immigration policy, equality for men
and women, a strong welfare state, and high subjective well-being,
high degree of interpersonal trust, and the encouragement of a well-
balanced life in which work is balanced by interests and familial as well
as social activities. Sweden is the society that represents the extreme
of the Secular-Rational and Self-Expression dimensions. Sweden also
is the country that has consistently had the lowest scores for church-
oriented religion in these surveys.5
In this country with a population of just over nine million people,
the welfare state model remains one of the most advanced in Europe.
This means that the taxation system is high, as are the educational,
social and health care benefits. Sweden is the only one of the Scandi¬
navian countries that has, in modern history, never been occupied or
directly involved in a major war. It has a high standard of living, and
the encompassing dimension of the welfare state has included a model
of care from the cradle to the grave.
248 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

THE CHURCH OF SWEDEN

In this welfare model, up to the year 2000, Sweden had a state church:
the Church of Sweden, based on the Protestant evangelical Lutheran
tradition. To glimpse the importance of this transition at the turn of
the current century, a very brief historical overview is required.
From the twelfth century all Swedish kings were Christian, and
Christianity was the official religion. Sweden was a province of the
Roman Catholic Church. A large number of churches were built
throughout the country. The national format with locally organized
church districts became the social governmental format that still
exists today. During this period the cloister system developed that
played a significant role in providing social welfare, education, and
dissemination of knowledge and cultural information from other
parts of the world.
In the sixteenth century the Protestant Ref¬
ormation brought an official transition from the
The Church of Sweden
Roman Catholic to the evangelical Lutheran ori¬
and Meaning-Making
entation. Swedish became the language used in
The Church of Sweden until the
church services, and the Bible was translated
year 2000 was the state Church of
Sweden and thus has had—and still into Swedish. The church and state were joined
upholds—a national meaning-making in the seventeenth century, and the Evangelical
function which cannot be compared Lutheran Church became the official and the only
with any other of the meaning-mak¬ permitted religion. During the eighteenth century
ing institutions in Sweden. Since, in both internal and external opposition to the reli¬
other words, the Church of Sweden gious monopoly of the Church of Sweden arose
maintains a vicarious meaning-mak¬ and led in the nineteenth century to the creation
ing function; I believe it is accurate of splinter groups within and outside the official
to see this church as the meaning¬
church. The Swedish Baptist, Methodist, Mission,
making background against which the
and Salvation Army movements became separate
institutionally un-affiliated make their
worshiping communities. In 1860, it became pos¬
individual choices.
sible to leave the state church in order to worship
—Maria Liljas, Ritual Invention:
in another evangelical organization. In 1862, the
A Play Perspective on Existential
Ritual and Mental Health in Late
church and state districts became separate organi¬
Modem Sweden (Uppsala: Uppsala zations, resulting in the state assuming responsibil¬
University Press, 2005), 120. ity for education and social welfare. In accordance
with the freedom of religion law in 1951, it became
Existential Ritualizing in Postmodern Sweden | DeMarinis 249

possible to leave the state church without joining another religious

organization.
In 1991, the national tax office assumed responsibility for all
national and local registers. From 1996, baptism became the require¬
ment for state church membership, previously an automatic affilia¬
tion from birth. In 2000 the Church of Sweden transitioned from the
official state church to an independent religious organization, yet with
powerful ties to the state.6 The Church of Sweden remains, for the
majority of ethnic Swedes, a living part of their cultural if not always
active religious heritage.
But long before this official change, church attendance began to
decline, with currently only about 5 percent of the population attend¬
ing Sunday worship services regularly. The Church of Sweden, even
after the official split from its state function, remains in a privileged
position socially, and its rituals of baptism, marriage, and burial
remain in wide use. In addition to traditional church services, which Fig. 10.1. Twelfth-century
church in Gotland, Sweden,
are poorly attended, especially in large urban areas, church buildings
one of more than ninety on
are widely used for musical and other cultural events and remain the small island and part
of the Christian cultural
open to all those interested in finding a quiet place for contemplation.
heritage of Sweden. Photo
On occasion, the buildings are also used for combination events such courtesy of Harry Benjamin.
as expressive dance and meditative exercises
that include a brief worship service.
The lack of church attendance and the
label of secularization, however, especially
when viewed from a more functional per¬
spective, do not mean that existential ritu-
alization is extinct. In fact, in Sweden, as
in many other countries where traditional
religious expressions are decreasing, there is
evidence, from the same World Values Survey
research presented earlier, of a rise in broader
spiritual concerns. “The need for meaning
becomes more salient at high levels of exis¬
tential [here meaning economic] security so
that, even in rich countries, although church
attendance is declining, spiritual concerns are
not disappearing.”7
250 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

The above profile of the Swedish population is linked to those who

are ethnic Swedes. To this image needs to be added the diverse immi¬
grant population, which includes those with ethnic roots in Africa,
the Middle East, South America, North America, and other parts of
Europe as well as Scandinavia. These individuals and groups reflect
various types of meaning-making systems, with different means for
expressing existential ritualization. At points, the very open, secular,
and tolerant Swedish society, with its policy of religious freedom,
comes into conflict with ethnic groups whose religious expressions are
apprehended as being too different or too extreme. In the most recent
debates since the beginning of this new century and against the back¬
ground of global events, ethnic groups with a religious and/or cultural
base in Islam are among those refugee groups often having a chal¬
lenging time making Sweden a new homeland. This is certainly not a
situation unique to Sweden. Nevertheless, the way in which religious
myths and misunderstandings are fueled by media and popular cul¬
ture in this very secularized and still dominantly monocultural society
are tangible. Other ethnic minority groups in Sweden, especially those
with a Christian heritage such as the Suroyo (see case 3 presented in
the next section), have experienced a more tacit acceptance in Sweden
as a result of their Christian background and a different cultural cli¬
mate concerning refugees when they first arrived in Sweden.8
Globalization and cultural diversity in cultural contexts such as
Sweden are contributing to the emergence of new questions relating
to existential meaning and its ritualized expression. To some degree
traditional religious institutions are identifying these questions and
trying to make decisions about future directions of service. To a great
degree, individuals and groups of the dominant ethnic Swedish and
other ethnic backgrounds are consciously living the challenge to find
pathways to new or renewed expressions of existential ritualization.

EXISTENTIAL RITUAL EXPRESSION

The need for existential ritual expression is not in any way a new
phenomenon. From a developmental psychological perspective, this
need is basic to human survival, to the formation of personal and
Existential Ritualizing in Postmodern Sweden | DeMarinis 251

social identity, and to the socio¬

cultural signals and codes that
define group membership. This
type of ritual expression, encom¬
passing cultural rites of passage,
seasonal celebrations, and com¬
munity worship, has been more
or less automatic to persons
born and raised within a partic¬
ular group cultural context. To
be a part of the group or com¬
munity has meant to be a part of
its existential ritual expression.
The given worldview—the lens
by which reality is viewed and
ordered—surrounding a given
system of ritual expression has
been most often inherited and
not consciously chosen. This
worldview affects all aspects of
how life is lived and also perceptions of physical, psychological, and Fig. 10.2. This newer com¬
spiritual health and illness.9 mercial building in Stockholm
appears to reach higher into
One of the critical differences in the existential ritual process hap¬ the heavens than the church
pening now in Sweden, but also in many other cultural contexts as spires behind it, a visual
evocation of changing dynam¬
well, is that the element of choice is being introduced. It is this aspect ics between religion and
secular culture. Photo © Peder
of postmodernism that is creating the biggest challenge. For many,
Bjorkegren/Etsa/Corbis. Used
the postmodern period presents new opportunities and new means by permission.
for existential exploration. For others, it presents a time of lostness,
when there is an almost desperate searching for an existential home, a
sense of belonging. Often times the search leads to actions and efforts
of belonging that have detrimental consequences for psychological
and existential health and development. A young ethnic Swedish man
expressed his feelings about his existential search in this way:

Growing up my parents didn’t have any belief structure or special

activities. I tried to invent my own as a child, but you can’t do
this in isolation. Later I got into different things with alcohol and
252 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

smoking, but it didn’t feel like anything to build on. And then I
went through a real period of depression, partly because of being
abandoned by my father but also because I didn’t have any way to
make meaning and still don’t. I feel this huge emptiness just drift¬
ing without a base. I can’t decide things, and I feel very alone. The
medicine I sometimes take does not give me an answer to mean¬
ing only a temporary escape.10

This example is not an isolated one. Growing numbers of persons in

this postmodern context are struggling and searching to find ways of
making meaning that reflect a worldview and existential ritual expres¬
sion that provide a sense of well-being and life-affirming identity. It is
not uncommon for these existential struggles and searches to lead to
the need for psychiatric intervention.
A natural question the reader may be asking at this point is:
“Where is there existential hope and direction in this postmodern
context?” The following section discusses three examples of hope and
direction that are not exhaustive of the different types of existential
ritual experimentation, but are representative.

THREE EXAMPLES
All these examples are kinds of ritual experimentation. This designa¬
tion is meant to signify the searching nature of those involved in the
struggle to express their existential beliefs in significant actions, and
to strengthen their beliefs through these actions. Each case reflects, in
a unique way, the kind of identity issues, struggles, and ways of com¬
ing to terms with existential ritualizing in the postmodern Swedish
cultural context. The cases reflect the lives of ordinary people strug¬
gling to find ways of expressing and living their faith in a somewhat
extraordinary situation. The cases all draw from a Christian heritage,
using common Christian symbols and stories, yet each necessitates
a new translation of these symbols and stories in order for them
to function as living expressions of faith. In each example, those
involved are struggling to find and/or create new stories in order to
stop, at least for brief periods of time, patterns of what can be experi-
Existential Ritualizing in Postmodern Sweden DeMarinis 253

enced as relentless questioning. They are also trying to find a sense of

community together, a means for meaningful renewal and existential
nurture.

The Sann Manniska Network

The term sann manniska, which directly translates from the Swedish
as “true human,” alludes to a phrase in the Nicene creed: “True God,
true man.”11 The organization Sann Manniska began in 1992 as a joint
effort of Petter Wingeren, a priest of the Church of Sweden, and Ulf
Stahlhandske, a teacher at Sigtuna, a local community college. The
project from its inception was focused on understanding how to be
truly human in church: how to make use of bodily, creative, relational,
and sexual energies of being human in a more fundamental way in
church life and in its liturgy. Nature and the natural environment
were also very important. Over time the original idea of the project
changed. It began as the core of a movement within the Church of
Sweden to liberate the body in faith, life, and practice, with a primary
focus on church services and rituals, and shifted to a more participant-
centered core, less a church movement and more a network to meet
the ritual needs of the participants. Though links remained to the
church, the more the project evolved, the less the organized church
was interested—apart from individual church members, both clergy
and laity, who were a part of the network.
The Sann Manniska network organized twelve ritual workshops
between 1992 and 1997. The network consisted of just over a hundred
people, and about seventy to eighty attended one or another of the
Sann Manniska meetings. At each of the individual meetings between
eleven and twenty-five people participated. There was a core group
of ten persons. The age range in the network and core group ranged
from twenty to fifty. The core group and network were dominated by
women, a not uncommon phenomenon. People from all over Swe¬
den were involved, but the majority came from the regions around
Stockholm and Uppsala (the capital and the central university city on
Sweden’s east coast). The majority of participants were ethnic Swedes.
Many of the younger participants were university students, and most
of the older had a university degree.
254 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

The participants’ relationships to the Church of Sweden varied.

Most had at least some cultural or religious connection, having gone
through the church’s rituals of baptism and confirmation. The spec¬
trum ranged from active engagement to absolute disengagement.
During the time of participation, the Sann Manniska ritual experi¬
ence became for some a complement to the church, or a substitute for
church rituals as they moved away from the church, and for others a
new search for ritual fulfillment as they had not ever been active in
church rituals.
Sann Manniska’s rituals were all based on improvisation in some
way, and over time guidelines, or rules, for the rituals were developed.
The ritual rules concerned instructions for forming the ritual room,
ritual time, entrance and exit practices, silence, a special talk-space, a
rest-space, and leaving and stopping procedures. Four types of ritual
forms were used by the group:

• rituals planned with a specific theme (certain of the

communion rituals, for example);
• rituals planned without a theme, where form but not
content was decided beforehand;
• unplanned with a theme, such as rituals around
“masculinity-femininity”; and
• unplanned without a theme (most of the ritual events).

The ritual planning process was leaderless, and all members had a
voice in the process. True to Swedish form, many of the rituals were
held outdoors in beautiful natural settings often near a large lake, or
combined both inside and outside sequences.

Feminist Liturgies12

The feminist liturgical movement in Sweden represents a type

of religious revival more than one of secularization. During the
twentieth century a sacramental renewal and liturgical revival was
associated with both the high church movement in the Church of
Sweden and with the ecumenical movement. This resulted in a much
higher frequency of Eucharistic celebration, especially in contrast to
Existential Ritualizing in Postmodern Sweden | DeMarinis 255

the beginning of the 1900s, when this liturgical

function had almost disappeared from weekly Women in the Church of Sweden
services. Along with this renewal came a sacra¬ Women priests, upholding tradition in
mental change in the interpretation of the liturgy, the same way as men, is one side
influencing both the Church of Sweden and the of the present reality in the Church
Free Churches (Protestant denominations, such of Sweden. There is, however, also
as the Swedish Baptist, Methodist, and Mission another current, more in line with cul¬

Churches, with prominent spiritual-evangelical tural or radical feminism, where the

expressions of belonging and worship). stress lies on valuing the specific gifts
and experiences of women.
Feminist liturgies are both dependent upon
—Ninna Edgardh Beckman, "The
and a reaction against the verbalist tendency, the
relevance of gender in rites of
tendency to devalue the role of the congregation,
ordination," in Hans Raun Iversen,
and the tendency to focus on sin and forgive¬
Rites of Ordination and
ed.,
ness. An interesting paradox is that the liturgical
Commitment in the Churches of the
renewal, to which the feminist liturgical move¬
Nordic Countries: Theology and
ment is indebted, was closely related to resistance Rerminology (Copenhagen: University
to the ordination of women. Ironically, important of Copenhagen, Museum Tusculanum
and empowering liturgical advances were accom¬ Press, 2006), 545.
panied by the negation of gender equality with
respect to womens ordination. This needs to be understood against
the background of Sweden as one of the most advanced countries in
terms of gender equality, women’s rights, and womens representation 5^en3'photo ©'j'i^nS
in the power-making structures of all societal institutions. Elfstrom. Used by permission.
Feminist liturgies
in Sweden have not
developed as the result
of an organized move¬
ment, although steps in
this direction have been
taken in recent years
through the organiza¬
tion of national con¬
ferences on feminist
liturgy. The liturgies
have instead developed
as spontaneous expres¬
sions, emerging out of
256 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

women’s gatherings from the

1970s onwards.
The Sofia-massa (Sofia Mass)
is named for Lady Wisdom, Sofia,
in the Jewish and Christian tra¬
dition, and represents a form of
liturgy introduced by women as
an alternative to the traditional
and androcentrically labeled
forms of worship. These masses
are inclusive of both women and
men. The first of these masses,
celebrated on December 4, 1994,
Fig. 10.4. Sophia Mass in in Stockholm, was attended by 250 people and received much atten¬
Sweden. Photo © Jim
Elfstrom. Used by permission.
tion in the Swedish media. These masses are held two to four times a
year in Stockholm, and have spread to other parts of the country. The
Sofia Mass includes most components of a traditional high Mass, but
with a new understanding of God and humanity, of gender relations,
and of the Bible. Words, gestures, and dance are used to embody these
understandings.

Third-Generation Suroyo Acculturation

This example is of a generation of children, now young adults, of

religious refugees to Sweden who are struggling to negotiate the
postmodern landscape in a largely secularized cultural context. The
term “Suroyo” (including those identifying themselves as Arameans,
Assyrians, Chaldeans, and Syrianer) refers to those sharing the Syriac
Orthodox Christian tradition.13
During the twentieth century a Suroyo migration took place
within Middle Eastern countries such as Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq,
and Iran, and also to developed countries internationally. The migra¬
tion from each country varied in its characteristics, but there are com¬
mon patterns related to economic, religious, political, labor, and social
factors. Increased violence toward and discrimination against the
Suroyo in the Middle East are shared factors common for the group.14
In the 1970s, a large wave of Syriac Orthodox Christian religious and
Existential Ritualizing in Postmodern Sweden DeMarinis 257

political refugees from Turkey and other countries of the Middle East
came to Sweden. In comparison to other ethnic groups, the Suroyo as
a group has a strong resolve to remain in Sweden. This is in no small
part due to the reality that they have no country to which they can
return.15
As psychologist of religion Onver Cetrez notes, the Suroyo migra¬
tion to Sweden took place in several phases. The first phase began
in 1967, with Suroyo coming to Sweden from different Middle East
countries as quota refugees, defined as those who prior to arrival have
been granted residence permits within the refugee quota framework
executed through the Swedish Migration Board.
A second phase took place in the first half of the
1970s, with residence granted for political and Suroyo Youth in the Churches
humanitarian reasons. Phase three was in the The ethnic church or associations are

late 1970s, with special emphasis on Suroyo from for the youth, in comparison to their
parents and grandparents, not nec¬
Turkey and with a quota system for reuniting
essarily the only providers of care,
families. Political turmoil and war brought Suroyo
information, social meeting points,
in the 1980s from Syria and Lebanon and in the
and rites of passage. Institutions in
1990s from Iraq.
mainstream society and new technol¬
It is difficult to find satisfactory demographics
ogies also meet some of these needs.
on the total population of Suroyo in Sweden; there Quality places for the youth may still
are complications because of the immigrants’ dif¬ be found in church buildings, but also
ferent countries of origin, and Sweden’s national in centers of recreation, in sports are¬
statistics do not classify by ethnicity or religion. nas, and in traveling to countries of
The ethnic group itself gives a figure of seventy origin. Religion and kinship for the 3rd
thousand to eighty thousand for the total popula¬ generation Suroyo youth are better

tion in Sweden (when using a broad approach to approached as personal and cultural

the different minority groups that are included in resources and practices of differentia¬
tion for meaning-making, among other
this labeling of Suroyo).16
resources and practices, than as all-
While the Suroyo in their countries of ori¬
encompassing spheres of meaning.
gin were an internal minority characterized by
—Onver Cetrez, Meaning-Making
religious difference, being a Christian minority
Variations in Acculturation and
among Muslims, in Sweden the Suroyo have
Ritualization: A Multi-Generational
become an immigrant group among others, being Study of Suroyo Migrants in Sweden
differentiated more in ethnic than in religious (Uppsala: Uppsala University Press,
terms. Despite this change of minority positions, 2005), 312.
“the ethnic relations in Sweden are far more
258 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

just in juridical terms than they were in the countries of origin.”17

Nevertheless, this minority group, as others, has been negatively
portrayed. Debates about immigrants often include topics such as
“gang rape, honor killings, forced child marriages and female genital
mutilation.”18
For the majority of members of the third generation (and even of
the second generation to some degree) of Suroyo in Sweden, negotia¬
tion of cultures, worldviews, and existential ritualized activity is not
optional. These negotiations, an everyday occurrence, for members of
this minority cultural group are energy-draining, ongoing, and with
no certain outcome. They need to be understood against the power
structure of a dominant as distinct from a minority culture.
The third generation, born and raised in Sweden, have Suroyo
religious and kinship culture at home. It is important to note that,
in terms of the categories of the World Value Surveys, this cultural
group represents a near-opposite orientation to traditional values
and self-expression than that found in mainstream Swedish culture.
In the classic Suroyo culture, traditional family and religious patterns
are valued. A collective in contrast to an individual focus is the norm.
During childhood, for the third-generation Suroyo, traditional cul¬
tural forces, including the Syriac Orthodox Church, are the primary
shapers of how worldviews are formed and how existential ritualizing
is practiced. Especially for those families living in close-knit Suroyo
communities in the suburbs of large cities in Sweden, these influences
continue to shape and guide values, behaviors, and existential ritualiz¬
ing into adolescence and beyond. But as this generation is educated in
Swedish schools and becomes accustomed to the dominant Swedish
cultures meaning-making strategies, its members will have to make
certain choices. As Cetrez has written:

They [members of the third generation] have to choose elements

from or ways of interacting with each specific cultural system they
encounter: the agricultural of their grandparents, the modern or
industrial of their parents, and the postmodern society in the
mainstream Swedish context. Acculturation for the 3rd genera¬
tion becomes much more complicated, consisting of different or
sometimes even contradictory worldviews, as well as worldviews
Existential Ritualizing in Postmodern Sweden | DeMarinis 259

having different validity. At the same time as collective safety,

economical welfare, and social safety are important, the 3rd gen¬
eration being children of Swedish society also value life quality or
life-meaning as do the mainstream youth of their age.19

The words of one young woman on her worldview negotiation

and existential ritualized activity provide a glimpse of the kind of chal¬
lenge cultural negotiation at this level entails.

My worldview is not just from one way of thinking, but several.

Somewhere in the background I am Christian from an Ortho¬
dox Catholic church in my country of birth. But after coming to
Sweden I rebelled against the church. I tried the Lutheran church
but it wasn’t much better. For me the church and God are not the
same. I tried to find a home for my questions and doubts but I felt
as an outsider. I find strength from a feminist group which I have
been involved in for three years. We have our own symbols and
small rituals of meaning and belonging. I’ve given up trying to
decide WHICH is the one I want. I now just accept that I belong
to both but in my own way. I don’t feel this is wrong. It works for
me and keeps me from going crazy with all the uncertainty in the
world around me.20

AN AGENDA FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

These three examples illustrate the need and desire for a type of onto¬
logical security in an age and context that do not, and in reality cannot,
readily provide such. Psychological and existential needs and desires are
what these groups have in common. However, the particular solutions
and types of ontological security will vary in ritualized forms and faith
expressions. In this kind of postmodern cultural context, the individual
and group need to re-create the stories and symbols that will provide
such security. In addition, stories and symbols need to come alive in
sacred and safe spaces for individual and communal expression.
Critically important questions concerning existential health and
existential dysfunction in this Swedish welfare state were raised at
260 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

the close of the twentieth century. Since Swe¬

Cross-Cultural Experience and den is one of the remaining and relatively well¬
Meaning-Making functioning welfare states, a public health agenda
The homogenous model of culture is in response to these questions would seem in
but one dimension of cultural reality order, especially considering the mental health
today.... Cross-cultural reality exists consequences of existential dysfunction. This type
for immigrants and refugees living
of development would certainly seem like a logi¬
in those places [the new homeland].
cal development of the World Health Organiza¬
For such persons developmental-
tion’s understanding of the current (also referred
preventive concerns involve both the
to as third) public health revolution: “The third
unconscious and conscious activities
public health revolution recognizes health as a key
of negotiation and balance between
the different cultural worldviews and
dimension of quality of life. Health policies in the
meaning-making frameworks. 21st century will need to be constructed from the
—Valerie DeMarinis, "Psychological key questions posed by both the health promo¬
Function and Consequences of tion and population health movements. ‘What
Religious Ritual Experience". makes people healthy?’ Health policies will need
InFlit, symbol och verklighet: to address both the collective lifestyles of modern
Sex studier om ritens function, societies and the social environments of modern
ed. Owe Wikstrom (Uppsala: life as they affect the health and quality of life of
Tro och Tanke: Svenska kyrkans populations.”21 What I am proposing is an exis¬
forskningsrad), 16.
tential preventative public mental health agenda.
Such an agenda will require the participation and
coordination of many public and private actors, including primary
and secondary schools, religious and worldview institutions (such as
humanists), and university systems.
In many ways, attention to existential need can be incorporated
into the public school setting. As world religion and world affairs are
already a part of the school curriculum, these classes can be expanded
to include more intentional work on students’ own expressions of onto¬
logical security, existential ritualization, and worldview construction.
Religious and worldview institutions can provide, in addition to
organized worship and gatherings for members, safe spaces for those
who do not belong to an organized group, where one is able to ritual¬
ize and create or re-create stories of meaning that will help to provide
a base of ontological security. These institutions, such as the Church
of Sweden, can also provide existential caring, since their leaders are
trained to hear the existential needs expressed in the stories of doubt,
Existential Ritualizing in Postmodern Sweden | DeMarinis 261

sadness, and ontological longing of persons struggling in this post¬

modern context.
This kind of existential caring requires the type of education and
training best suited to a university context. Specially designed training
and continuing education courses can thereby be constructed to meet
this need for professionals like priests, pastors, deacons, and hospital
chaplains, directed toward a needs-based approach. A preventive
approach to existential development in cultural context can become a
part of the training process for elementary and high school teachers,
where applied learning modules could be included in required courses
related to religious and worldview perspectives. Mental health profes¬
sionals also need training in order to recognize the dimension of exis¬
tential need based on ontological insecurity as distinguishable from
other dimensions of, for example, depressive symptoms. Such courses
are being developed in psychology of religion at Uppsala University.

FOR FURTHER READING

Cetrez, Onver. Meaning-Making Variations in Acculturation and Ritualization: A Multi-
Generational Study of Suroyo Migrants in Sweden. Uppsala: Uppsala University
Press, 2005.
DeMarinis, Valerie. “Existential Dysfunction as a Public Mental Health Issue for Post-
Modern Sweden: A Cultural Challenge and a Challenge to Culture.” In Tro pa
teatret: Essays om religion og teater, edited by Bent Holm, 229-43. Copenhagen:
Copenhagen University, 2006.
-. Pastoral Care, Existential Health and Existential Epidemiology: A Swedish Post¬
modern Case Study. Stockholm: Verbum, 2003.
Edgardh Beckman, Ninna. “Lady Wisdom as Hostess for the Lord’s Supper: Sofia-Mas-
sor in Stockholm, Sweden.” In Dissident Daughters: Feminist Liturgies in Global
Context, edited by Teresa Berger, 159-74. Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox,
2001.
Liljas, Maria. Ritual Invention: A Play Perspective on Existential Ritual and Mental
Health in Late Modern Sweden. Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, 2005.
Pettersson, Thorleif. “Religion in Contemporary Society: Eroded by Human Well¬
being, Supported by Cultural Diversity.” In Measuring and Mapping Cultures:
25 Years of Comparative Value Surveys, edited by Yilmaz Esmer and Thorleif Pet¬
tersson, 127-54. Leiden: Brill, 2007.
 Twentieth-Century Global Christianity
Part 3
AND AUTHENTICITY
INNOVATION
ORDINARY CHRISTIANS
AND THE HOLOCAUST

VICTOHIA J. BARNETT
CHAPTER ELEVEN

God simply made me an outsider.

—Gertrud Staewen, a Protestant member
of a Berlin resistance group helping Jews1

In order to lead the National Socialist German struggle against world Jewry,
the quick and thorough implementation of the dejudaization of the Christian
church is of high and essential significance. Only when the dejudaization of
the Christian church is completed can the German people join in carrying
out the fight of the Fuhrer .. . and can the divine commission of the German
Volk assist in its fulfillment.
—Hugo Pich, Thuringian church superintendent2

Our church, which has been fighting in these years only for its self-
preservation, as though that were an end in itself, is incapable of taking the
word of reconciliation and redemption to humankind and the world. Our
earlier words are therefore bound to lose their force and cease, and our
being Christians today will be limited to two things: prayer and the doing of
justice.
—Dietrich Bonhoeffer, May 19443

A growing body of scholarship on the behavior of ordinary people

during the Nazi years of terror between 1933 and 1945 has
focused primarily on German citizens and, after 1939, the popula¬
tions of Nazi-occupied countries. The range of behavior was wide,
including that of bystanders and perpetrators, and was shaped by
each country’s history, culture, and particular experience of war and
occupation. Although few of these studies focus extensively on the
religious underpinnings of peoples reactions to Nazism, any study of

265
266 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

the behavior of ordinary people during this era is in fact also a study
of ordinary Christians. Throughout Europe as well as in the United
States, over 95 percent of the population was Christian.
The most instructive case study—and the one in which the record
of both the church leadership and lay members has been documented
most extensively—is that of Nazi Germany itself. This chapter will
focus primarily on the reaction of ordinary Christians in Nazi Ger¬
many, then offer a brief overview of some of the responses of Chris¬
tians outside Nazi Germany, and conclude with observations of what
motivated Christians who responded to the persecution and genocide
of the European Jews.

NAZI GERMANY
The picture of ordinary people that has emerged from the study of
Nazi Germany is one of widespread complicity, ranging from passive
acquiescence to active involvement. The instances of resistance against
Nazism and rescue of its victims were the actions of a small minor¬
ity. Even more troubling, most research reveals that the cooperation
of the majority was not coerced but voluntary, reflecting an active
affirmation of at least some aspects of Nazi ideology and the values
it expounded.4 As historian Peter Fritsche writes, “It should be stated
clearly that Germans became Nazis because they wanted to become
Nazis and because the Nazis spoke so well to their interests and incli¬
nations.’5 After January 30, 1933, the rapid conformity of ordinary
Germans to Nazi regulation of daily life, including the new measures
that targeted and isolated their Jewish neighbors, is striking and well
documented.6
Over 98 percent of the German population in 1933 was Christian.
Over 95 percent belonged either to the Roman Catholic Church or to
the German Evangelical Church (the Protestant church of Germany,
which included churches from the Lutheran, Reformed, and United
traditions). The so-called free churches (Mennonites, Methodists,
Baptists, and other denominations) were quite small, as were religious
groups considered to be sects, such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses and
Christian Scientists. The Jewish minority was less than 1 percent.
 Ordinary Christians and the Holocaust | Barnett 267

In the early postwar

years in Germany, the
Christian churches often
portrayed themselves as
having heroically opposed
Nazism. When church
leaders did acknowledge
their failure, they por¬
trayed it as a failure to
live up to their Christian
principles, accusing them¬
selves, in the words of the
Protestant church’s 1945
Stuttgart Declaration of
Guilt, “for not witnessing
more courageously, for not praying more faithfully, for not believing Fig. 11.1. Thousands attend
a convention of the German
more joyously, and for not loving more ardently.”7 Yet just as there Christian movement at the
is now more research on the behavior of ordinary people, there is Berlin Sportpalast. The banner
that hangs from the balcony
also a solid body of research that refutes this early hagiography and says, "The German Christian
documents the pervasive complicity of the Christian churches with Reads 'The Gospel in the Third
Reich.'" November 13,1933,
Nazism. Far from having opposed Nazism from the beginning, most Berlin. Photo © ullstein bild /
church leaders either actively welcomed the new regime or quickly The Granger Collection, New
York.
made their peace with it. Many of them publicly condoned the mea¬
sures against Jews, citing Christian teachings.8

THE INSTITUTIONAL CHURCH AND ITS LEADERS

To understand the behavior of ordinary Christians under National
Socialism, we must understand the institutional context in which this
occurred, particularly the so-called church struggle (Kirchenkampj)
within German Protestantism. We must also understand the larger
ideological dynamics of the time, particularly the way in which the
widespread popular affirmation of a German Volksgemeinschaft
(community of the German people) shaped Christian behavior. Volks¬
gemeinschaft was the ideological cornerstone of Nazi society and its
understanding of the role of citizens, fostering the emergence of what
268 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

historian Claudia Koonz has called “an ethnic conscience” that was
based upon a “communitarian morality.”9
The religious implications of this communitarian morality were
articulated in paragraph number 24 of the 1920 Nazi party platform,
which espoused the party’s commitment to what it called “positive
Christianity”:

We demand the freedom of all religious confessions in the state,

insofar as they do not jeopardize its existence or conflict with the
manners and moral sentiments of the Germanic race. The party as
such upholds the point of view of a positive Christianity without
tying itself confessionally to any one confession. It combats the
Jewish-materialistic spirit at home and abroad and is convinced
that a permanent recovery of our people can only be achieved
from within on the basis of common good before individual
good.10

Paragraph 24 made most ordinary Christians and their clergy feel

that there was a place for them within the Nazi party and, after 1933,
within the Third Reich. “Positive Christianity” seemed an affirmation
of the central role that Christian belief could play in the new Volksge-
meinschaft, and the importance of the “common good” seemed to
emphasize a positive new communitarian principle. Few Christians at
the time were troubled or offended by the paragraph’s anti-Semitism.
The main problem that would emerge for the churches was
expressed in the first sentence of the statement, with its affirmation of
the kind of religious belief that would not conflict with the “manners
and moral sentiments of the Germanic race.” In fact, Paragraph 24,
although it was only one section in a larger document that laid out the
Nazi agenda, revealed how the party viewed the link between religious
sensibility and racist ideology. The foundation of National Socialism
was its ideology of racial superiority and its various policies, including
the genocide of the Jews, which were designed to create a pure “Aryan”
race that would dominate Europe. Christians were thus challenged by
the regime to reconcile their religious beliefs with the Nazi agenda. A
fierce struggle within the German Protestant church soon broke out
between those who embraced racial ideology and sought a nazified,
 Ordinary Christians and the Holocaust | Barnett 269

Aryan church and those who viewed this as an ideological corruption

of Christian values and belief.
While the primary source of tension between the Nazi regime and
the two major churches was the conflict between Nazi ideology and
Christian belief, others factors contributed to the division. Church
leaders were distressed by the more extreme Nazi ideological pur¬
ists, who viewed religion as an outmoded superstition that would be
superseded by National Socialism. In particular, the writings of party
propagandist Alfred Rosenberg alarmed church leaders. Rosenberg’s
The Myth of the Twentieth Century attacked both Jews and Christians
for undermining German values and the Volksgemeinschaft, and
his book was censured by the Vatican. Rosenberg’s outspoken anti-
Christianity was a minority opinion within the party, however, so
many church leaders dismissed it as not being symptomatic of party
attitudes.
They were far more alarmed by the Nazi policy of Gleichschal-
tung—the synchronization (essentially the nazification) of all sectors
of society under the authority of the party; this threatened church
institutional independence. For the churches, Gleichschaltung was
epitomized by the move to create a unified Reich Church that would
ultimately incorporate both the Catholic and the Protestant churches
and propagate the nonconfessional Christianity described in the party
platform. The attempt at a Reich Church soon foundered because
of the strong opposition of church leaders. They were not nearly as
outspoken, however, in their direct dealings with the Nazi state. Here
the response of both Catholic and Protestant leaders was to work out
compromises with the Nazi state as they attempted to retain their
independence. The most prominent example was the 1933 Concor¬
dat signed by Catholic leaders and Nazi state officials. The Catholic
Church viewed this as a state guarantee that the church would retain
sovereignty over religious institutions, including schools. Yet such
agreements—as well as the corresponding photographs of church
leaders alongside Nazi officials—gave the regime an added legitimacy.
Throughout the Nazi era, moreover, the churches’ strategy of cautious
compromise with the state would mean a consistent and deliberate
avoidance of any direct criticism of the government, particularly on
political matters.
270 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

The Protestant situation was far more complex than the Catholic
one, given the lack of a centralized leadership that could make agree¬
ments with the state and the significant diversity in the leadership and
membership of the twenty-seven Protestant regional churches. The
greatest challenge in the Protestant church, even before 1933, was the
division among different theological and ideological factions. After
1933, this division led to the German church struggle, or Kirchen-
kampf The Kirchenkampf was very much a grassroots phenomenon
and actually had its beginnings in the 1920s, when several revivalist
movements throughout Germany sought to reinvigorate German
Protestantism during an era of great social and political change
and instability. During the Nazi era these different movements took
Protestants in opposing directions. The pro-Nazi German Christians
(.Deutsche Christen) embraced the nationalist and ethnically defined
understanding of Christianity that had been articulated in Paragraph
24. The opposing group became known as the Confessing Church
Fig, 11.2. Ludwig Mueller, (.Bekennende Kirche), which opposed the ideologically defined religion
standing on a podium on the of the German Christians and called for a church based solely upon
steps of the Berlin cathedral,
addresses a group of German the confessions and the scriptures.
women in traditional dress
The Kirchenkampf ignited over the attempt to create a Reich Church
during his formal installation
as Reich Bishop, September and most particularly over the status of baptized “non-Aryans”—people
23,1934, Berlin. Photo©
of Jewish descent whose families had at some point converted to Chris¬
Suddeutsche Zeitung Photo.
Used by permission. tianity. Germany had one of the most highly assimilated Jewish popu¬
lations in Europe, and there
were actually almost three
times as many non-Aryan
Christians as there were secu¬
lar or observant Jews. Almost
90 percent of them were Prot¬
estant.11 With the Nazi ascent
to power, these people were
now subject to Nazi racial
laws, and the German Chris¬
tians immediately supported
the establishment of a Reich
Church that would not only
bar non-Aryans from the
 Ordinary Christians and the Holocaust I Barnett 271

ministry and other church positions, but also create a church (and
Christianity) more reflective of Nazi values.
The German Christians defined themselves as a populist move¬
ment dedicated to aligning German Protestantism with “Germanic”
values and culture. They created new liturgies and hymns as well as an
insignia that superimposed the swastika over the cross. They incorpo¬
rated the highly gendered rhetoric found in Nazi propaganda about
the role of women and the necessity for a strong “manly” and milita¬
ristic Christianity that could stand up to the rest of Europe.12
The aspect that was most controversial was their attempt to “ary-
anize” Christian doctrine and scripture, even eradicating the Hebrew
scriptures and all references to Jesus’ Jewishness. This met with strong
opposition from most Protestant leaders and theologians. (The setting
of ethnic criteria for church membership and baptism antagonized
Catholic leaders as well.) Although they agreed with nationalism, sup¬
port for the new state, and much of the cultural rhetoric, traditional
Protestant bishops could not tolerate theological heresy. Nonetheless,
they hoped to retain the German Christians in the Protestant fold.
At the height of the movement in late 1933, the German Christians
comprised about one third of the Protestant pastorate, and their
popular following was strongest in the regions where the Nazi party
had the most support. While these numbers would subsequently drop,
the German Christians retained control of several regional churches,
prominent seminaries, and theological faculties, and they continued
to be influential throughout the Third Reich.
The Confessing Church was initially founded as the Pastors’
Emergency League to help non-Aryan church employees who were in
danger of losing their jobs. As the radicality of the German Christian
worldview became clearer, a number of theologians and church lead¬
ers joined forces to compose a theological and ecclesiological response
to what they viewed as the ideologization of Christianity. In May 1934,
representatives of all the regional Protestant churches met in the town
of Barmen and unanimously approved the Barmen Declaration of
Faith, a six-point document written by the Reformed theologian Karl
Barth. The declaration decried the ideological Christianity of the Ger¬
man Christians and laid the foundation for potential opposition to
the state, claiming that a true church could only follow one Lord, not
272 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

a worldly Fiihrer.13 The Barmen Declaration was the founding docu¬

ment of the Confessing Church.
While those who met at Barmen included Lutheran bishops and
the heads of United and Reformed churches, the meeting actually led
to much broader changes in the Protestant church, driven largely by
lay members and the emerging generation of theological students,
which included the first generation of women permitted to attain
theological degrees. Within months, the more outspoken members
of the Confessing Church were being harassed by German Christians
and coming into conflict with state authorities. This sector of the Con¬
fessing Church argued that it represented the true church and that the
mainstream leadership, by compromising with both the state and the
German Christians, had ceased to have any integrity. As the radical-
ization of this sector of the Confessing Church intensified, the leaders
who had met at Barmen retreated to more neutral ground. By 1935,
mainstream Protestant leaders viewed the German Christians and the
Confessing Church as equally problematic extremes that threatened
to bring about a church schism and, in the case of the Confessing
Church, risked antagonizing Nazi state authorities.
Both the German Christians and Confessing Church were popu¬
lar movements that energized hundreds of thousands of Christians.
In a church that had traditionally been strongly hierarchical, the
outspoken and ongoing struggle between them raised theological and
political issues that permanently altered the nature of German Prot¬
estantism, particularly in the Confessing Church’s challenges to the
traditional alliance of church and state authority.
Thus the behavior of Protestant leaders paralleled that of their
Catholic counterparts—a cautious accommodation to the Nazi state.
Criticism of the state, usually confined strictly to church-related mat¬
ters, was coupled with expressions of support for National Socialism.
All too often these statements of support explicitly agreed with the
anti-Jewish measures. When Bishop Wurm of Wurttemberg, in a letter
to a state official, privately protested the violent pogroms of Novem¬
ber 1938 (also known as Kristallnacht), he added, “I contest with no
word the right of the State to fight Judaism as a dangerous element.”14
In particular, the churches—even the Confessing Church—avoided
any kind of solidarity with persecuted Jews. The church protests on
 Ordinary Christians and the Holocaust I Barnett 273

behalf of non-Aryan Christians deliberately avoided addressing the

plight of observant or secularized Jews; throughout the Third Reich,
the concern even of the Confessing Church would be restricted to
members of the Christian church. In September 1935, a small group of
Christians submitted a memorandum to a Confessing synod meeting
in Berlin. The memorandum documented the persecution of Jews in
Berlin and called upon the Confessing Church to protest; the synod
leaders refused to even include it on the official agenda.15
Catholic and Protestant church leaders’ caution toward Nazi
authorities meant that the opposition to the state that did emerge
among Christians—including acts of rescue and resistance on behalf
of persecuted Jews—was generally carried out by ordinary people,
often in opposition to the church leadership and certainly without
their support.16

ORDINARY PEOPLE AND RESCUERS

Of those who helped persecuted Jews, many were women working in
the helping professions as social workers, deaconesses, and educators.
This is particularly evident in the little we know about the isolated
cases in which Jews, Catholics, and Protestants worked together to
help those victimized by the Nazi regime.17 Most of these people seem
to have been involved in social ministry—working with the poor, in
soup kitchens, in hospitals and institutions. These kinds of charities
traditionally see the most interreligious cooperation and also mark
the intersection of religious and social movements.
In 1911, Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze, a Protestant pastor and
social worker, had established an organization in the slums of east
Berlin that by the 1920s had developed into a group of welfare centers,
drawing volunteers from the ranks of pacifists, political leftists, Quak¬
ers, Catholics, and Protestants. Many of these volunteers eventually
found their way into circles that helped Jews, including the Protestant
Gruber office in the late 1930s, which helped Jews emigrate as long
as that was possible. In July 1933, Siegmund-Schultze himself was
deported for his efforts on behalf of Jews.18 From exile in Switzerland
he began to help refugees and became part of a loose network of
274 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

Christian and political groups throughout Europe

Memo to the Confessing Church that in the following years would become impor¬
The following Is an excerpt from a tant in both rescue and resistance activities in
memo submitted by Protestant church Germany, France, Switzerland, Holland, and the
social worker Elisabeth Schmitz to the Scandinavian countries.19
1935 Steglitz Synod of the Confessing This network of rescue and resistance ulti¬
Church. The bishops at that synod mately involved a number of efforts usually thought
refused to include the memo on the to represent individual and isolated cases. One was
official agenda.
the White Rose student group in Munich, which
What should we answer to the
included Hans and Sophie Scholl, a brother and
question, "Where is your brother
sister who distributed anti-Nazi leaflets and who
Abel?" We in the Confessing Church
were executed in 1943. Another was the village of
have no better answer than Cain's....
Le Chambon in France, a village of French Hugue¬
Why must we continually hear from
the ranks of the non-Christians that nots that rescued thousands of Jewish children.
they feel the Church has abandoned During the war the French Protestant Cimade
them? ... Why doesn't the Church group worked to help thousands of Jews impris¬
pray for those suffering guiltlessly, oned in concentration camps in occupied France.
those under persecution? Why aren't The link between each of these cases was a group
there prayer meetings for the Jews, of key but little-known Christians with connec¬
like there were prayer meetings tions throughout Europe, each of whom within
when the pastors were arrested? The his or her own circle was carrying information
Church makes it bitterly difficult for
and trying to promote the activities of localized
us to defend her. Since when was
resistance groups. Tracy Strong, the American
it anything other than blasphemy to
general secretary of the YMCA, traveled through¬
contend that it is the will of God for us
out Europe carrying messages between different
to promote injustice? Let us take care
groups and trying in particular to help the work
that we do not enthrone the evil of our
sins in the Temple of the Will of God.
of the Quakers in France. Laura Livingstone was
—Theodore Thomas, Women a British Quaker who worked with Jews in Berlin
against Hitler (Westport, Conn.: and then headed refugee efforts in Britain once
Praeger, 1995), 39-40. the war began. Adolf Freudenberg was an exile
from Nazi Germany who headed the ecumenical
refugee offices in Geneva. Gertrud Staewen, the self-described outsider
cited in the epigraph on p. 265, was a Christian socialist who worked
with a small resistance group in Berlin that helped several Jews escape
Nazi Germany. Gertrud Luckner, a Catholic and a trained economist
and social activist, was incarcerated in the Ravensbruck concentration
camp until the end of the war as a result of her efforts to rescue Jews.
 Ordinary Christians and the Holocaust I Barnett 275

Fig. 11.3. Group portrait

of Jewish and non-Jewish
refugee children sheltered
in various public and private
homes in Le Chambon-sur-
Lignon during World War II
with some of the French men
and women who cared for
them, 1943. Photo © United
States Holocaust Museum,
courtesy of Peter Feigl.

This network was one level of the activism of ordinary Christians.

The more common phenomenon throughout Europe was rescue by
individuals: decent people who decided, often at great risk, to hide
Jews or help them escape. Certainly not all of
those who rescued did so on the basis of Chris¬ A Petition of Protest
tian conviction—in fact, the research on rescue The following is an excerpt from a
during the Holocaust shows that religion was not 1943 petition protesting the deporta¬
a significant factor in shaping the motivations tion of German Jews that was sent by
of the rescuers. In the seminal study of rescu¬ a Bavarian group, the "Lempp Circle
ers conducted by Samuel and Pearl Oliner, only to Bavarian Bishop Hans Meiser, who
15 percent cited religion as a motivating factor.20 refused to sign it.

While the research on rescue doesn’t yield any As Christians, we can no lon¬
ger bear that the church in Germany
single predicting factor, the Oliners came up with
remains silent about the persecution
a personality profile that seemed to fit rescuers;
of the Jews_Every "non-Aryan,"
its dominant characteristic was a pronounced
whether Jew or Christian, has "fallen
“sense of attachment to others and their feeling of
among murderers" today in Germany,
responsibility for the welfare of others, including
and we are asked whether we meet
those outside their immediate familiar or com¬ him like the priests and Levites or like
munal circles.”21 In the occupied countries (the the good Samaritan.
Oliners primarily studied rescuers from Poland) —Victoria Barnett, For the Soul of the
many rescuers had some personal connection People (New York: Oxford University
with the person they rescued. Others, particularly Press, 1992), 199.
in France and Scandinavia, viewed rescue as a
276 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

patriotic form of resistance against Ger¬

man occupation.
Another striking pattern among
rescuers that emerges was the marginal -
ity of many of those who found their
way into rescue or resistance. Many
were women. They were laypeople, not
church leaders. They were often found
in groups that had been politically mar¬
ginalized and targeted by the Nazis:
leftists, homosexuals, pacifists. Among
Fig. 11.4. A priest and sev¬ religious groups, the ones with the greatest record of opposition to
eral nuns pose with a group
of children at a Franciscan
National Socialism and activism on behalf of its victims are the ones
convent school in Lomna, with a history of religiously grounded opposition to authority, such as
Poland where Jewish chil¬
dren were hidden during the the Quakers.
German occupation, April It is important to remember that those involved in rescue and
24,1946. Photo © United
States Holocaust Museum, resistance activities were in the minority. The vast majority of Catholic
courtesy of Lidia Kleinman and Protestant citizens in Nazi Germany conformed to the regime and
Siciarz.
supported its rules. The work of historian Robert Gellately documents
the degree to which the Nazi police state apparatus, including infor¬
mants who turned in Jewish neighbors, was based upon the extensive
and voluntary cooperation of private citizens. With the onset of the
war in 1939 and the German invasion of Eastern Europe, Jews in those
countries suffered horrific violence, not only at the hands of invading
German soldiers but all too often from their neighbors, who witnessed
and sometimes joined in the violence. This violence sometimes car¬
ried the explicit sanction of Christian church leaders in those regions.
In Slovakia, President Jozef Tiso, an ordained priest, defended the
deportations of over fifty thousand Jews, sparing only those who had
converted to Christianity.22 Archbishop Karol Kmetko of Slovakia
refused the pleas of a local rabbi to protest the deportations of Jews,
saying that the only way the Jews could save themselves was to con¬
vert to Christianity. Bishop Brizgys, head of the Lithuanian church,
told his clergy not to help Jews who asked for help.23 In Poland, some
Christians continued to base their anti-Semitism on Christian teach¬
ings, even after the Holocaust ended.24
 Ordinary Christians and the Holocaust I Barnett 277

CONCLUSION
What do the reactions of ordinary Christians during the Holocaust tell
us about the intersection of religious belief, prejudice, and behavior?
Studies of the Holocaust often focus on Christian theology, particu¬
larly Christian teachings about Judaism, to explain the poor record
of Christianity under National Socialism. Church historians tend to
emphasize the institutional and ideological dynamics of that complic¬
ity, especially in terms of church and state relations. Both of these
perspectives are valid and give insight into the complex dynamics of
complicity. Anti-Semitism was pervasive in that era and was certainly
part of the mentality of many Christians throughout Europe. In Nazi
Germany it was augmented by patriotism and nationalism, especially
among Protestants.
Thus, the reaction of Christians to the Holocaust is an instruc¬
tive case study in the intersection of ideology and religion, belief and
behavior, and above all in the conformation of Christian theological
and ecclesiological understandings in alignment with state power.
Examining the behavior of ordinary Christians brings these larger
dynamics into a different light by altering our perception of the role
of belief and even theology, for we see how easily theological and doc¬
trinal precepts became fluid and were adapted to the larger political
movements of their time. Even leading theologians revised their the¬
ologies to conform to the new Nazi spirit and the political priorities
of the Volksgemeinschaft.25 The endorsement of a racist and genocidal
ideology by prominent figures, as well as by church leaders, had a pro¬
found effect on ordinary Christians, for it legitimated the actions of
the Nazi state and made it much harder for individuals to stand up on
behalf of victims. The history of Christian behavior under Nazism is
in many ways a cautionary tale about the seductive power of a popular
religiosity, and it illustrates how pliable religious belief really is and
how easy it is for people to use religion to reify their prejudices and
nationalism. This was why the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writ¬
ing from prison in 1944, concluded that Christianity, particularly its
institutions, had been profoundly tainted, and that all that remained
for ordinary Christians was “prayer and the doing of justice.”
278 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

Most of those who with¬

The Seelisberg Address to the Churches, 1947 stood the lure of this revised
We have recently witnessed an outburst of antisemitism which theology were in some way
has led to the persecution and extermination of millions of outsiders and thus better
Jews. In spite of the catastrophe which has overtaken both able to hear and respond
the persecuted and the persecutors, and which has revealed
to the needs of the Jewish
the extent of the Jewish problem in all its alarming gravity and
victims of Nazism. The cases
urgency, antisemitism has lost none of its force, but threatens
in which we find Jews and
to extend to other regions, to poison the minds of Christians
Christians actually working
and to involve humanity more and more in a grave guilt with
disastrous consequences.
together in resistance and

The Christian Churches have indeed always affirmed the

rescue are so rare through¬
un-Christian character of antisemitism, as of all forms of racial out the historical literature
hatred, but this has not sufficed to prevent the manifestation that they fairly jump off
among Christians, in various forms, of an undiscriminating the page. Yet in the wake of
racial hatred of the Jews as a people. the Holocaust these were the
This would have been impossible if all Christians had very individuals who opened
been true to the teaching of Jesus Christ on the mercy of God up a new era of Christian-
and love of one's neighbour. But this faithfulness should also Jewish conversation, a cru¬
involve clear-sighted willingness to avoid any presentation
cial but immensely difficult
and conception of the Christian message which would support
relationship in the wake of
antisemitism under whatever form. We must recognise, unfor¬
the genocide of the European
tunately, that this vigilant willingness has often been lacking.
Jews. In 1947, a group of
We therefore address ourselves to the Churches to draw
sixty-three Jews and Chris¬
their attention to this alarming situation. We have the firm hope
that they will be concerned to show their members how to pre¬
tians met in the Swiss village
vent any animosity towards the Jews which might arise from of Seelisberg and, on the
false, inadequate or mistaken presentations or conceptions of basis of a study paper by the
the teaching and preaching of the Christian doctrine, and how French Jewish historian Jules
on the other hand to promote brotherly love towards the sorely- Isaac, issued the Seelisberg
tried people of the old covenant. Address to the Churches,
—From the Address to the Churches, Seelisberg, Switzerland, which outlined ten points
published by the International Council of Christians and Jews, for Christians to affirm in
http://www.jcrelations.net/en/?item=983. the wake of the Holocaust.26
The background of most of
its signers is little known, but what is striking about many of them is
that they had firsthand experience of the Holocaust—and the failure
of the churches. Isaac and most of the Jews who attended had lost
family members. Many of the Christians in attendance had attempted
 Ordinary Christians and the Holocaust I Barnett 279

to help Jews. These ordinary people issued an early document that

established the foundation of post-Holocaust theology as we know
it.27 Their experience and wisdom, as well as their courage in con¬
fronting the Holocaust’s immediate challenges to Christianity, stand
in stark contrast to the complicity of many Christians during the Nazi
era. Nevertheless, the Seelisberg meeting, like the engagement of those
Christians who resisted Nazism and attempted to rescue its victims, is
a reminder of the power of ordinary people.

FOR FURTHER READING

Barnett, Victoria. For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest against Hitler. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992.
-. Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity during the Holocaust. Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood, 1999.
Bergen, Doris. Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich. Cha¬
pel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
Ericksen, Robert P., and Susannah Heschel, eds. Betrayal: German Churches and the
Holocaust. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999.
Fritsche, Peter. Germans into Nazis. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Gellately, Robert. The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1933-1945.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Gushee, David. Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust: Genocide and Moral Obligation.
St. Paul: Paragon House, 2003.
Haas, Peter. Morality after Auschwitz: The Radical Challenge of the Nazi Ethic. Philadel¬
phia: Fortress Press, 1988.
Hockenos, Matthew D. A Church Divided: German Protestants Confront the Nazi Past.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.
Journal of Contemporary History 42, no. 1 (2007), special issue on Christianity in Nazi
Germany.
Phayer, Michael. The Catholic Church and the Holocaust: 1930-1965. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2000.
 ECUMENISM
OF THE PEOPLE

PATRICK HEWRY
CHAPTER TWELVE

E cumenism, said Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple in

1942, is “the great new fact of our era.”1 The registering of that
fact in histories, news stories, and encyclopedias gives the impression
that ecumenism is a matter of organizations and large gatherings, of
scholars meeting for years to find points of convergence, of agreed
communiques, and church unions. That story is grand, it is momen¬
tous, and it is not the whole story.
Many people are part of “the great new fact of our era” without
knowing it, because the term “ecumenism” is over the horizon of
common vocabulary. Indeed, one of the greatest ecumenists, Father
Thomas Stransky, CSP, when asked, “What is ecumenism?” replied,
“Ecumenism is something which, if we had a better name for, we
would have more of.” Father Stransky is himself a wizard at helping
people realize they are ecumenists even if they don’t know the word.
“Ecumenism” is linguistically noble and colossal—it comes from
Greek and means “the whole inhabited world.” In a Christian frame¬
work, ecumenism resonates with “God so loved the world” and Christs
prayer that all his followers be one, and it names the effort by members
of specific denominations to overcome the splintering of the church of
Jesus Christ by acknowledging and claiming the gift of unity. While the
theological motive for ecumenism is the unity Christ prayed for, much
of the energy of popular ecumenism comes from experience with
neighbors, friends, family. Faithful Christians today say, think, feel,
and believe positive things about other Christians that their ancestors
a century earlier would have recoiled from. And almost universally

280
 Ecumenism of the People I Henry 281

these faithful Christians, whether they call themselves ecumenists or

not, report that the more they appreciate the faithfulness of others, the
more they grasp the faithfulness of their own traditions. Unity does
not require uniformity; indeed, it is allergic to it.

THE "CANNOT"
Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister, who has published thirty books,
was set on an ecumenical course when she was in second grade. Her
mother was Catholic, her stepfather Presbyterian. Joan rushed home
from school one day. “What did you learn in school today that has you
so wound up?” her mother asked. “Sister said that only Catholics go
to heaven.” “Oh, really? And what do you think about that, Joan?” “I
think Sister’s wrong.” “And why do you think Sister would say a thing
that’s wrong?” “Because Sister doesn’t know Daddy.” “Sister,” says Sis¬
ter Joan recalling this moment, “was missing some of the evidence.”2
The people’s history of ecumenism is many things, but at root
it is the story of countless experiences like Joan’s, a conviction that
what was taught was wrong, based on someone’s “missing some of
the evidence,” and that one could not in fact believe it. To condense
the experience into a single word, we can say that the people’s history
of ecumenism is grounded in a “cannot”—not “I will not believe” or
“I choose not to believe,” but “I cannot believe.” And the ripple effect
of that “cannot” has extended far. Today it would be difficult to find
a Catholic nun who thinks the gate of heaven barred against Presby¬
terians (or even Buddhists, for that matter). To round out the irony, I
know a Presbyterian nun.
When Herbert Chilstrom was a boy growing up Lutheran in
Litchfield, Minnesota, about the time Archbishop Temple was declar¬
ing ecumenism the new fact of our era, he would quickly move to
the other side of the street if he saw a Catholic priest or nun walk¬
ing toward him. When, toward the end of the twentieth century,
Chilstrom retired as the first bishop of the newly united Evangelical
Lutheran Church in America, Archbishop John Roach of the Arch¬
diocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis was an honored guest at the
retirement party.3 What happened in the intervening half century
282 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

was a seismic shift in Christian identity, and it is

An Approach to Ecumenism a measure of the power of the “cannot” that most
Organize as if there is no prayer; pray Christians would find it as unthinkable today that
as if there is no organization. Archbishop Roach would not be at that party as
—John R. Mott (1865-1955), they would have understood in an earlier era why
a founder of the World Council Catholics and Protestants didn’t want to encounter
of Churches, winner of the one another on the sidewalk. The peoples history
Nobel Peace Prize in 1946. of ecumenism is an account of how something
that many would not have dreamed of—except
in their nightmares—has come to seem the most natural thing in the
world.

BACKGROUND
The ecumenical movement is generally portrayed as a twentieth-cen¬
tury phenomenon, though there were periodic (and mostly episodic)
efforts at Christian reconciliation in earlier times. The seedbed was
in the missionary movement. In Africa and Asia, when Christian
missionaries of various denominations attempted to perpetuate the
distinctions and antagonisms of their churches back home in Europe
and North America, potential converts were both mystified and scan¬
dalized. The missionaries came to realize that in their new context, so
like that of the earliest Christians in the Roman Empire, the differ¬
ences paled, and they were forced by their circumstances to recognize
each other as sisters and brothers in the faith—the faith, deeper than
any of their particular expressions of it. Ecumenism was born in the
missions, not in libraries and seminar rooms; it began when people
who were preaching the gospel grasped that they could no longer talk
about other people who were preaching the gospel the way they had
been taught to talk about them.
While the mission field was the arena in which doctrinal differ¬
ences began to move to the periphery of concern, the traditional cen¬
ter of Christendom, the North Atlantic, saw a burgeoning of common
social effort by Christians, initially in the devastation following World
War I, and then in the vaster catastrophe of World War II. To the issues
labeled “Faith and Order” were added those called “Fife and Work.”
 Ecumenism of the People | Henry 283

These latter, in so many ways expressions of the mandate from Jesus in

Matthew 25 to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the
stranger, clothe the naked, care for the sick, and visit the imprisoned,
have been and remain a particular focus of popular ecumenism. That
Christians would not work together (and also with persons of other
religious traditions or none) in soup kitchens, AIDS shelters, and the
like is today as unthinkable as Lutherans and Catholics avoiding each
other on the street.
The movements of Faith and Order and Life and Work developed
independently in the first decades of the twentieth century; they came
together in 1948 at the founding of the World Council of Churches.
The World Council is the centerpiece of ecumenical history, joined in
the 1960s by the revolutionary Second Vatican Council of the Roman
Catholic Church, and this story has been told often and well.4 While
it has many of the marks of institutional history, the story also inter¬
sects time and again with popular history, because what the World
Council and the Second Vatican Council stand
for, promote, and nurture resonates with the
The World Council of Churches
wide and deep effects of the ecumenical “cannot.”
The World Council of Churches is a
The most intense moment of intersection came
fellowship of churches which con¬
in 1982, with the publication of a document, fess the Lord Jesus Christ as God and
Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry, that was the Savior according to the scriptures, and
fruit of fifty years of erudite theological work by therefore seek to fulfill together their
eminent scholars—and the book became a run¬ common calling to the glory of the one
away best seller and was the focus of thousands of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
small-group discussions around the world. This It is a community of churches on

document is discussed in more detail below; it is the way to visible unity in one faith and

mentioned now to signal that there is no clear line one eucharistic fellowship, expressed
in worship and in common life in
of demarcation between history as we are used to
Christ. It seeks to advancetowardsthis
it and peoples history. It is a matter of focus and
unity, as Jesus prayed for his follow¬
emphasis.
ers, "so that the world may believe"
The strands leading up to 1948 are many.
(John 17:21).
An important one was highlighted by Robert S.
—From "Basis of the World
Bilheimer in Breakthrough: The Emergence of the
Council of Churches,"
Ecumenical Tradition: that much of the leader¬ see www.oikoumene
ship of the movements that coalesced in the .org/en/who-are-we.html.
World Council of Churches was provided by
284 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

laypersons and by young people. The Student

Christian Movement, the Worldwide YMCA, and
the Interseminary Movement galvanized energies
and shaped careers. John R. Mott, credited by
many as the chief architect of the World Coun¬
cil, was a Methodist layperson, and formulated
what most practical-minded ordinary Christians
would immediately recognize as an appropriate
plan of action, free of theological gobbledygook
and pious posturing: “Organize as if there is no
prayer; pray as if there is no organization.”5
It is hardly surprising that a movement that
began among laypersons was soon being man¬
aged by clerics and denominational officials.
Ordinary Christians could be heard complaining
about bureaucracy, about out-of-touch profes-
Fig. 12.1. The logo of the sionals, and either about too much concern with theological quibbles
World Council of Churches.
in the face of the worlds crying need or about excessive social action
Courtesy of the World
Council of Churches, without attention to theological fundamentals. Ecumenism, like so
Geneva, Switzerland.
many vital human motivations and actions, came to seem like some¬
thing “they” do: this meant that it could be left to “them,” and/or “they”
could be blamed for whatever you did not like. At the height of the
Cold War, the World Council of Churches was subjected to a blister¬
ing attack in Reader’s Digest, a powerful reflector and shaper of popular
attitudes not only in the United States but also around the world.6

WAKING UP
Positive popular engagement with ecumenism, like so much else in
a peoples history, is hard to document. People were doing ecumen¬
ism without writing a lot about it, and those who wrote were often
angry about something. It was my privilege over a period of thirty
years (twenty as its executive director) to be closely involved with the
Collegeville Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research, which
is committed to discerning and nurturing popular ecumenism, and
much of this chapter will draw on my experience. A peoples history of
ecumenism is necessarily impressionistic and idiosyncratic.
 Ecumenism of the People Henry 285

My predecessor as executive director, Bob Bilheimer, often said

that the job of the ecumenical movement in general, and of the Insti¬
tute in particular, is to help people who are already ecumenical but
don’t know it recognize their true identity—in short, to wake them up.
These are people who have more in common with their counterparts
in other denominations than with many in their own traditions. In
some instances, ecumenical identity is a recovery
of something they knew as children, as Sister Joan
did, but may have forgotten as they grew older. Pope John Paul II on Ecumenism
In others, it is a confirmation of what has come The commitment to ecumenism must
clear only with mature experience, as in Herb be based upon the conversion of
Chilstrom’s case. In Bob Bilheimers own story, it hearts and upon prayer, which will
was a paradigm shift in thinking that confirmed also lead to the necessary purifica¬

something he “knew” but didn’t know he knew. tion of past memories. With the grace
of the Holy Spirit, the Lord's disci¬
ples, inspired by love, by the power
One day, while I was an undergraduate, I
of the truth and by a sincere desire
was walking across campus with a remark¬
for mutual forgiveness and reconcilia¬
able man, the secretary of the Student Chris¬
tion, are called to re-examine together
tian Association. We were talking about the
their painful past and the hurt which
church, and I said I had no use for it. In
that past regrettably continues to pro¬
reply to his question, “Why not?” I spoke of
voke even today. All together, they
my church back home to which I had had to are invited by the ever fresh power of
go and which had meant very little, and of the Gospel to acknowledge with sin¬
what seemed to me the general insignificance cere and total objectivity the mistakes
of churches. “But that is not what I mean made and the contingent factors at
by church,’” he said. “What do you mean?” work at the origins of their deplorable

“The church,” he said, “is the Body of Christ, divisions. What is needed is a calm,

and you are a member of it.” I stood still and clear-sighted and truthful vision of
things, a vision enlivened by divine
looked at him; we walked on. I had never
mercy and capable of freeing people's
thought about that before.7
minds and of inspiring in everyone a
renewed willingness, precisely with
Before long Bilheimer understood, as Chittis-
a view to proclaiming the Gospel to
ter and Chilstrom did, that one’s church is too
the men and women of every people
small—that there is more than one family room and nation.
in God’s house, and that each family room, if not —Pope John Paul II, introduction
sealed off from the others, is a good place to be. to the encyclical Ut Unum Sint
Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theo¬ (1995), 2-3.
logical Seminary and a major voice in evangelical
286 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

Christianity, learned through sustained contact

The Birth of Ecumenical Fellowship and conversation that people in other rooms are
Perhaps even more influential than not as scary as he once thought. “Now when I
the official studies are the changes speak about other groups of Christians, I remem¬
which are taking place within the life ber that I have friends in those groups.” Indeed,
of the churches themselves. We live “there are also times, now, when I take part in
in a crucial moment in the history of groups with members of my own denomination
humankind. As the churches grow
and wish my Orthodox and Roman Catholic
into unity, they are asking how their
friends were there, because they would under¬
understandings and practices of bap¬
stand what I was saying. I have built up new loy¬
tism, eucharist and ministry relate to
alties to Christians from those other traditions. I
their mission in and for the renewal
have very much needed them to help me explain
of human community as they seek to
who I am as a Christian.”8 Mouw has discovered
promote justice, peace and reconcili¬
ation. Therefore our understanding of spiritual kinfolk among those he used to think of
these cannot be divorced from the as aliens and has learned one of the fundamental
redemptive and liberating mission of ecumenical truths—that people can use very dif¬
Christ through the churches in the ferent language to mean much the same thing,
modern world. and the same language to mean something very
Indeed, as a result of biblical and different.
patristic studies, together with the Chittister’s, Chilstrom’s, Bilheimer’s, and
liturgical revival and the need for com¬
Mouw’s are twentieth-century ecumenical stories.
mon witness, an ecumenical fellow¬
There are also tales that reach back directly into
ship has come into being which often
earlier eras. Margaret O’Gara, a leading Roman
cuts across confessional boundaries
Catholic ecumenist, coined a phrase that captures
and within which former differences
the surprise of popular ecumenism: “the ecumen¬
are now seen in a new light. Hence,
ical gift exchange.” To illustrate it, she recounts a
although the language of the text is
still largely classical in reconciling moment in a class she was teaching in the 1990s.
historical controversies, the driving The final days discussion turned to personal
force is frequently contextual and reminiscences. A woman mentioned the name
contemporary. of her great-grandmother. A man said his great¬
—the preface to Baptism, Eucharist, grandmother had the same name. A rapid genea¬
and Ministry, Faith and Order Paper logical excavation unearthed the connection.
No. Ill (Geneva: World Council of Two sisters had grown up in an Anglican
Churches, 1982). family in Nova Scotia. One had become Catholic
and married a Catholic. Her Anglican family cut
off all contact with her. The two sisters never saw each other again;
all the knowledge their descendants retained was that a branch of the
 Ecumenism of the People Henry 287

family was missing. Those two sisters were the grandmothers of the
two students who were seeking priesthood, he as a Catholic, she as an
Anglican. That summer there were two ordinations, and both families
attended each. The ceremonies included a prayer that their ministries
would be an instrument for the reconciliation, not only of their fami¬
lies, but also for their whole church families, so that they could live
again as sister churches.9
Popular ecumenism, then, has many chronologies and choreog¬
raphies. It can trace its roots to childhood, adolescence, young adult¬
hood, middle age—or all the way back through several generations.
And while the stories recounted here are experiences of highly articu¬
late and theologically trained individuals, the experiences they recount
resonate with countless narratives I have heard from people who have
no bibliography and hold no position in a hierarchy. Popular ecumen¬
ism is accessible to all sorts of elites. “Ecumenism is not something
that is done to the people of God. It is something we do together.”10

ECUMENISM AMONG US
In Collegeville, Minnesota, in the summer of 1994, the powerful real¬
ity of popular ecumenism became especially vivid. In our planning
for a large conference sponsored by the Institute, we thought first of
calling it “Transmitting the Ecumenical Tradition.” As the program
committee talked, the center of gravity shifted. We realized that the
proposed title embodied an assumption needing to be challenged,
namely that there is something called the ecumenical tradition that
can be transmitted, with the clear implication that it is the norm
against which anything else that might claim to be ecumenical would
be measured and judged.
In earlier years we had already done boundary crossing, involving
in our discussions members of churches that were not part of the “offi ¬
cial” ecumenical movement (indeed, some from churches that were
highly, even caustically, suspicious of the World Council of Churches),
so we knew people who were genuinely ecumenical whose story was
not part of what would be generally understood as “the ecumenical
tradition.” At the conclusion of the committees meeting we realized
288 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

that our conference would be “Ecumenism Among Us”—no ones

story would be privileged, and something would be discovered, not
transmitted. The conference would not presuppose that we or anyone
knew for sure what ecumenism is; we would discern it together. The
conference was attended by 208 people, ranging in age from seventeen
to eighty-seven and shaped by more than forty Christian traditions.
The report of the conference mirrors our intention. It is not by any
stretch of definition an agreed communique. I was especially eager to
avoid such a formal result because of an experience nearly a decade
earlier, where popular ecumenism ran headlong into official ecumen¬
ism. I was one of twenty-six participants from thirteen countries in a
World Council of Churches consultation in Singapore on the relation
between the church’s unity and its commitment to justice (it often
happens that competing understandings of what is just and unjust
divide churches from one another, and even within themselves—Life
and Work can be just as contentious as Faith and Order). We were not
“ordinary” Christians in a peoples history sense—our professional and
ecclesiastical positions and our academic pedigrees would set us apart
in mixed company—but we were acutely aware of the particularities of
our individual experiences, and our conversations were spirited, pro¬
vocative, and inconclusive. As we approached the final day, those in
charge of the meeting proposed that we issue an agreed communique,
and they presented a draff. The members of the consultation imme¬
diately mounted a stiff resistance, insisting that we would not put our
names to something so clearly manufactured. The consultation mem¬
bers prevailed, but only after presenting an opposition that was unfa¬
miliar to ecumenical officials who were accustomed to being deferred
to as the “experts.”11 Our effective “popular” resistance anticipated
something an Ecumenism Among Us conference participant said
eight years later: “I believe the pressure from daily experiences will be
the only effective force in catalyzing denominational change.”12
Among the seismic changes in church life in the twentieth cen¬
tury that were registered at “Ecumenism Among Us” is the shift from
denominational divisions to ideological divisions within denomina¬
tions as the place where most Christians experience disunity. “We
seem to be splintering within as we seek to heal without. The best way
for healing with other communions is to learn to live with pluralism
 Ecumenism of the People I Henry 289

within. Reconciliation and grace are virtually impossible to communi¬

cate when the institution of the church is so visibly broken.”13 Herbert
Chilstrom, who as a boy crossed the street when he saw a Catholic
coming, was later, as a bishop, denounced by fellow Lutherans who
believe that ordaining gays and lesbians destroys the church. It is not
so much that the old ways are entirely out of date, but they are only
one part of a complicated, ever-shifting scene.

I see no one united ecumenical movement, but several streams

diverging farther from one another: interfaith dialogue and work;
institutional church union work; Christian unity prayer and
practice in the lives of individuals, families, and congregations;
the continuing reformation of denominations; churches working
together to feed the hungry and heal the sick; multidenomina-
tional rural parishes; marriages that succeed across denomina¬
tional lines; multidenominational teaching faculties of seminaries.
In this process there is an opportunity to let go of older formula¬
tions of the ecumenical movement.14

In some ways, indifference is a greater threat than division itself

to popular ecumenism. “Most Christians worship comfortably and
in good conscience in their own setting without being pained by the
state of church division.”15 It is unfortunately true that “ecumenical
activity” is often the first line item in a church’s budget to get cut when
times are tight, but the pain of church division is inescapable every
time a marriage crosses denominational lines. Couples in such situ¬
ations know that ecumenical discussion needs to shift from how the
traditions can help them to how they, on the basis of their experience,
can help the traditions find creative, even revolutionary ways beyond
the historical impasses.
At “Ecumenism Among Us” many additional features of popular
ecumenism surfaced.

• Members of Orthodox churches expressed unease with the

individualism of Protestants, and even of Catholics: “The
coming together of the church must be the reconciliation of
traditions, not individuals. I desire unity as much as anybody,
290 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

but I cannot move on my own.”16 For the Orthodox, “We

believe” is identity, not simply grammar.
• The deeply ecumenical nature of twelve-step programs,
especially Alcoholics Anonymous, was offered as a model of
repentance, reconciliation, and renewal.
• Choirs sing together even if they cant comfortably pray
together. Music is an ecumenical bridge.
• Multiculturalism was highlighted as experience, not simply
sociological observation: “It’s peculiar to me to hear about
multiculturalism as a change-, as an African American, I’ve
grown up in a multicultural situation, in which I’ve had to
know more about you than you about me.”17
• The center of gravity shifts from generation to generation:
“The middle-aged and older tended to choose the session,
When does dissent in the church become unfaithfulness?,’ the
younger, ‘How can the ecumenical situation abroad help us in
North America get perspective on our own?’ Is this because
young people have experienced more religious pluralism than
many older persons and therefore this is more of an issue for
them because they are less familiar with significant doctrinal
divisions, or, because they have grown up in an era of dissent,
they view dissent as usual and expected?”18
• Boundary crossing is not so much a challenge to be faced as a
given to be acknowledged: “Is there room in the ecumenical
movement for people who live on the boundaries of several
traditions?” “People tend to agree or disagree without any
reference to the church to which they nominally belong.”19 I
recall a gathering of forty Sunday school teachers in a Pres¬
byterian church at which the pastor asked, “How many of you
are ‘cradle’ Presbyterians?” Three hands went up.
• Hurt and healing deserve as much attention as disagreement
and truth: “We need to tread gently upon one another’s ‘holy
ground.’”20
• We must repeatedly go back to the beginning: “Regardless
how many times I have had an ecumenical conversation, or
how many times I have considered these questions, each time
I have it with someone new, I have it for the first time. For me,
 Ecumenism of the People I Henry 291

intentional willingness to go again and again into dialogue is

a first, next, and last step. Conversation doesn’t happen just to
move on to a next point”21
• “Being the church and fighting injustice are inseparable.” “It
strikes me as ironic that concerns for economic, racial, social
liberation, fundamental to the lives of millions of Christians
(and non-Christians), many (if not most) of whom are people
of color, can be labeled ‘issues,’ regarded as separate from the
gospel, or treated as if auxiliary to the Christian faith. Yes, I
make space in my own life for contemplation, study, silence,
etc., but I also come from an African people who do not/did
not dichotomize the world into secular/sacred, public/private,
and I also am in the heritage of Black American Christians
who heard God through the word call them into action, on
their own behalf and in behalf of God’s world. In faithfulness
to those heritages and all that God has enabled me to know,
experience, and become, the integrity of my Christian faith is
caught up with my faithfulness to serving the downtrodden
and freeing the captives (not just in a spiritualized sense).”22
• Arrogance undermines ecumenism. “Any kind of prophetic
protest needs to be spoken with the recognition that we can
be wrong. The longer I was in a stance of defending myself,
the more I was becoming the mirror image of the people who
were attacking me. You have to avoid becoming what you
hate.” “When I feel irritation, fear, or hostility as my response
to another, I can ask those emotions to be my teachers, to
show me what part of my spirit is frightened, in pain, and
feels the need for security and protection, to ask what steps
will open me to healing, to be more fully re-membered with
Christ’s body.”23

BAPTISM, EUCHARIST, AND MINISTRY

The year 1982 stands out in the popular history of ecumenism
because the “official” ecumenical movement and the disparate but
powerful expressions of the ecumenical “cannot” came together in an
292 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

unprecedented way that surprised nearly

Statement from an everyone. The World Council of Churches

Orthodox Commission published a booklet with the rather dry title
Members of the Joint Commission of the East¬ of Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry—and
ern Orthodox Churches and Oriental Orthodox it became almost instantaneously a best¬
Churches included official representatives seller, with over 450,000 copies in print in
of the Coptic Orthodox Church, the Syrian dozens of languages.24
Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and All the The fundamental reason for this break¬
East, the Supreme Catholicosate of All Arme¬ through of official ecumenism into popular
nians at Etchmiadzin, the Armenian Catholi¬ conversation was a decision taken in 1964
cosate of Cilicia, the Malankara Orthodox
to shift the focus of official ecumenical
Syrian Church of the East, and the Ethiopian
attention. “Instead of taking general themes
Orthodox Church from the Oriental Ortho¬
and trying to deduce from them elements
dox family; the Ecumenical Patriarchate, the
that would point the way for a new practice
Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria,
the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch,
in the churches,.. . the churches’ practice
the Russian Patriarchate, the Romanian Patri¬ was to be the focus of joint theological
archate, the Serbian Patriarchate, the Bulgar¬ reflection.” And it was the Roman Catholic
ian Patriarchate, the Georgian Patriarchate, Church that showed the way, “for the pro¬
the Church of Cyprus, the Church of Greece, ceedings [of the Second Vatican Council]
the Church of Albania, the Czechoslovakian had begun not with a general debate about
Orthodox Church, the Polish Orthodox Church, the nature of the church but with the ques¬
and the Finnish Orthodox Church from the tion of the renewal of the liturgy. Why not
Byzantine Orthodox family. also apply this approach to the ecumenical
We have now clearly understood that
movement?”25
both families have always loyally maintained
The worshiping life of the church—that
the same authentic Orthodox Christological
is, the church where people experience it,
faith, and the unbroken continuity of the
what people actually do, not an “under¬
apostolic tradition, though they have used
standing” of what they do—was to take
Christological terms in different ways. It is this
common faith and continuous loyalty to the precedence over theory. As a participant in
Apostolic Tradition that should be the basis for “Ecumenism Among Us” put it, “There is
our unity and communion. something cleansing about worshiping the
—"Second Agreed Lord together. Something miraculous hap¬
Statement" (1990) from the pens when I bow my head in prayer or raise
Joint Commission of the Eastern my voice in song together with a person
Orthodox Churches and Oriental I’ve been arguing with or about whom I’ve
Orthodox Churches. been having ungenerous thoughts. Wor¬
shiping with that person does more for the
 Ecumenism of the People | Henry 293

state of my heart towards him or her than any amount of wonderful

dialogue.”26 As worshiping together across denominational lines—the
sheer fact of praying with others was a crossing of traditional boundar¬
ies in many cases—became more common, especially after Vatican II,
people started asking whether this new fellowship could be expressed
in the eucharist.
In the 1960s and 1970s, many high-level meetings were devoted
to the refinement of texts on baptism, eucharist, and ministry, texts
whose origins in some instances could be traced back for decades.
In one such gathering of Baptists, there came a moment when the
ground shifted: “We immediately discovered that we could describe
our theologies of baptism in the polemical language of the past, or we
could face up to our common dilemma of the present. Fortunately, the
latter option prevailed. . . . We discovered that our practices are not so
different as our classical theologies might seem to imply.”27 Ordinary
Christians, one might plausibly surmise, had known this all along.
When the preliminary texts were submitted to the churches in the
mid-1970s, “the response was overwhelming.... In all, 186 official
responses were received, but interest went far beyond official bodies.
In many churches the texts were discussed in the local congrega¬
tions.” How can this be accounted for? “For many Christians in many
churches, the texts were the signal they had been waiting for. The
ecumenical movement had created fellowship across confessional
boundaries; Christians were meeting one another and sharing more
and more of their lives as Christians. As the differences between the
churches persisted, however, this fellowship could not develop as they
would have wished. Had the moment of ‘liberation’ come at last?”28
The texts were not a bolt out of the blue; they gave voice to what Chris¬
tians had been coming to know in the experience of “fellowship across
confessional boundaries.”
Clearly, the time was ripe for these basic elements of Christian
practice and life—baptism, eucharist, and ministry—to be discussed
openly and widely, not just by scholars and religious professionals. But
there was a particular feature of Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry that
set it apart from nearly all other official ecumenical documents. The
text, known also as the Lima Document, from the site of the meet¬
ing at which it was endorsed, contains very little theological jargon;
294 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

instead it weaves together biblical images that blur lines not by obfus¬
cation but by going deep, to where roots converge. I recall vividly the
visceral excitement I felt when I first read the booklet. The words on
the page came to life, blazed up in a way that one almost despaired
of ever seeing in documents produced by committees. People were
not accustomed to having their imaginations ignited by ecumenical
prose. Their response revealed just how hungry they were for a way to
express what they already knew to be true.
A particular feature of popular ecumenism helps explain the
huge impact of this document—the role of biblical study in the com¬
ing together of Christians. Different approaches to the Bible have of
course been among the most intractable points of contention between
churches, and until well into the twentieth century a prediction that
the Bible could effectively help to unite Christians would have seemed
preposterous. Not many papal encyclicals belong in a chapter on
popular ecumenism, but one is unavoidable—Divino afflante spiritu
(1943) of Pope Pius XII. Earlier popes had prohibited Catholic bibli¬
cal scholars from making any use of the historical-critical methods or
conclusions that had revolutionized Protestant understandings of the
Bible. Pius XII not only undid the prohibition but told Catholic schol¬
ars that they should actively engage in conversation with their non-
Catholic counterparts and learn from them. The consequence was
astonishing, and very nearly immediate. The results quickly spilled
over into the lives of laypersons.
Once Catholic biblical scholars were free to acknowledge that
the Bible was not sealed off from history, with all its probabilities
and ambiguities—so that, for instance, you could now argue for the
religious meaning of the story of Jonah without having to insist that
a man was swallowed by a giant fish and regurgitated alive three days
later—the way was open for all sorts of Christians to talk with each
other about their own encounters with the Bible. And if engagement
with Protestants made Catholics less wary of personal interpretation,
Catholics, with their instinctive appreciation for the teaching author¬
ity of the church and their sense of tradition, reminded Protestants
that no one comes to the Bible in isolation.29
A participant in “Ecumenism Among Us” underscored the
resonance between biblical understanding and popular ecumenical
experience.
 Ecumenism of the People I Henry 295

The Bible is the model I hold for Christian unity. I read the Bible
and see different writers from different centuries, holding differ¬
ent theologies, discoursing on the same problems, stories, events,
concepts. I see four gospels that do not agree with each other on
who Jesus is, what he said, where he said it, to whom, and why.
But I see them standing together, not requiring that the other
change, but only that it stand along with it. This is not a war,
rather a model of mutual respect and collaboration. I see stories,
but not obliterating the story of the other. Embellishing, maybe.
Changing the focus, maybe. But not obliterating. Poking fun at,
but not dehumanizing the other. Can the church learn from this
model?30

While I would still argue that the most powerful engine of popular
ecumenism is Sister Joans “cannot,” in all its various specific expres¬
sions, Christians’ recovery of the Bible, together, comes in a very close
second.

PEOPLE'S ECUMENISM AND MONASTICISM

In 1982, the same year as Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry, a book
called God on Our Minds appeared. It grew out of a six-year study
project at the Collegeville Institute. Bob Bilheimer had traveled around
the United States to ask, “What is the primary ecumenical question?”
In a variety of ways he heard this message: the fundamental issue goes
much deeper than church divisions, to the basis of theology—what
does it mean to confess faith in God today? This question, he came
to understand, was the real ecumenical equalizer, since Christians,
without respect to denominations, and whether trained theologians
or “ordinary” laypersons, were unsure of the answer.
A statement by one participant in the project, quoted early in the
book, registers a significant theme of a peoples history of ecumenism,
and one with which Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry, by its style and
tone, resonates: “Theology is too important to be left to the theolo¬
gians. Theologians need to listen to each other, but they also have
to heed the people who make, buy, sell, marry, have children, laugh,
cry, sometimes feel forced into situations where they are having to do
296 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

what they don’t want to do, long for the freedom to do all the things
they would like to do, and who share one thing in common—that the
last thing they will all do is die.”31 (Of course theologians are like this
too; the admonition means they should pay more attention not only
to others’ experience but also to their own.) A participant in “Ecu¬
menism Among Us” made much the same point: “People need to be
together as people—talk, eat, spend days, dance, make art and music,
consider issues, listen to each other, be silent together, see each other
in different moods.”32
Though popular fashion can easily be dismissed as faddish and
ephemeral, there are occasions when what people flock to tells us not
about mob behavior but about a precise intuition, almost a homing
instinct, for what is profoundly true. The explosion of worldwide lay
interest in monasticism as a source of spiritual wisdom is such an
occasion, and bears directly on popular ecumenism because of a fact
of history. The monastic tradition, in its classic forms, antedates most
of the major divisions in the Christian church. Saint Benedict knew
nothing of Orthodox and Roman Catholic, much less of Presbyterian
and Baptist and Pentecostal. And the form of life he organized has
persisted through the rise and fall of empires, discoveries of “new
worlds” (though not new to those who were already there), revolu¬
tions in thought and technology, and the dizzying splintering of the
Christian community.
Among the more delicious ironies of history I would count the
huge popularity of a book by Kathleen Norris, The Cloister Walk.
Her own tradition, Presbyterian, is not historically known for kind
thoughts about monks and nuns. The cloister walk—a place where
people made the catastrophic mistake of thinking they could earn
extra credit with God—had been gladly abandoned. Indeed, for the
Protestant reformers, and especially for the former monk Martin
Luther, monasticism was the most vivid symptom of the church’s hav¬
ing gone off the rails.
Yet in our own time, when in many parts of the world monastic
communities are shrinking, Protestants at least as much as Catholics
are flocking to monasteries for retreats, and are hungrily buying books
by and about monks and nuns because of a well-founded suspicion
that monasteries are places where people whose grasp of spiritual
 Ecumenism of the People | Henry 297

truth is as fresh as it is old, where they have tenaciously held on to

something of inestimable value that our warring denominations have
buried. And the key is in the first word of the Rule of Saint Benedict:
“Listen.” Popular ecumenism is about listening (as above: “listen,” “pay
heed”), and as such it is a recovery of an ancient mode of Christian
life, prior to the relentless demonizing of those who disagree with
you. Of course there was already, in the early centuries, plenty of
anathematizing, but there was also the monastic insight, codified by
Benedict, that the most you could hope to accomplish was a good
beginning, and Christians today who adopt and adapt Benedictine
spirituality are finding in its provisions for the journey the resources
they need to make sense of their own instinctive ecumenical spirit. As
an “Ecumenism Among Us” participant said, “Ignoring is the worst
form of violence. We need more of the conversations in which uncer¬
tainty, frustration, and pain are freely shared, in which those who
speak are not interrupted, corrected, or argued with, and those who
listen are not defensive.”33
A young woman, a college student, wrote about how encounter¬
ing monastic persons had given focus and direction to her spiritual
life: “Of course, Benedictines have a tremendous love for God. How¬
ever, they have love for many other things. I feel that the Benedictines
really are different from the rest of us, sadly because we see the world
in black and white. We take many things for granted. The Benedic¬
tines see the world in many colors. I really am making an honest
attempt to see the world in many colors because of my experiences.
I am amazed by the simplest or littlest things.”34 Benedict’s admo¬
nition that even kitchen utensils are to be treated as vessels of the
altar, his instruction to members of his community that they are to
keep death daily before their eyes, his insistence that the whole com¬
munity be called together for counsel and that the youngest be paid
special attention to—all these components of Benedictine spirituality
make sense to “ordinary” people and cut through denominational
obsessions that so often seem the paraphernalia of power games. In
their seeking of God, monks and nuns are surprisingly unconcerned
about getting all the terminology right. As Kathleen Norris (whose
writings both draw on and speak to popular ecumenism) says, in the
monastery “doctrine and dogma are effectively submerged; present,
298 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

but not the point.”35 And a remark at “Ecumenism Among Us” would
be instantly recognizable to any Benedictine: “Your doctrines, your
view of scripture, might be offensive to me; I may think you nar¬
row-minded, driven by a political agenda. But: how do I choose to
respond? Do I choose the offense? Do I respond in unity or division?
If your doctrine offends me, there’s much about you that doesn’t, and
I can’t be certain it offends God. Ecumenism is the willingness to
become family.”36

RECONCILING MEMORIES
The offenses that keep Christians apart may seem recent and immedi¬
ate, but most of them have roots that go back a very long time. One of
the ways scholarship instructs popular ecumenism is by demonstrat¬
ing the degree to which reconciling memories is even more crucial for
ecumenism than is dealing with issues.37
Popular ecumenism is in fact quite adept at reconciling memories,
often better than it knows. Its methods are among its best contribu¬
tions to the ecumenical gift exchange. Humor is an especially effective
solvent of conflict. A book called Just as We Were: A Nostalgic Look at
Growing Up Born Again, by four evangelical Christians, gently spoofs
restrictions they were brought up on while expressing warm apprecia¬
tion for the good intentions of those who imposed the restrictions.
The book not only reconciles the authors to their own memories but
also opens their world in an engaging way to those who might have
thought it laughable rather than humorous.38
While it is true, as noted before, that popular ecumenism doesn’t
regularly make itself heard in official ecumenical documents, it cer¬
tainly did in two wonderfully refreshing, witty passages of a recent
agreement between the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and
the churches of the Reformed tradition.

• On the issue of the eucharist: “Both Lutheran and Reformed

churches affirm that Christ himself is the host at this table.
Both churches affirm that Christ himself is truly present and
received in the Supper. Neither communion professes to
explain how this is so.”39 How many times have we been told,
 Ecumenism of the People Henry 299

and told others, that the best response to a question when you
don’t know the answer is “I don’t know”? Here, in a church
document, memories are reconciled by a simple, honest, and
humorous admission: “We don’t know.”
• On the issue of predestination: “To put the situation sharply:
rather than being divided over the doctrine, both sides seem
to be united in an equally lukewarm endorsement and an
equal embarrassment over any form of predestinarian teach¬
ing as part of their theological commitment.”40 “Equal embar¬
rassment”—a fair percentage of church-dividing issues could
be resolved by such an admission on both sides, followed by a
good laugh. In many of these instances, through the laughter
we could hear laypersons saying, with relief, “Finally they’ve
Fig. 12.2. Humor, Holy Con¬
started consulting us in matters of doctrine.” versation, Prayer, sculpture
created by Rosanne Keller
at the Ecumenism Among
The basic ecumenical test—do you tell my story in a way that I can Us conference, 1994. Photo
recognize?—needs to be modified: once I have heard you tell my story courtesy of Carla M. Durand-
Demarais, Collegeville
in a way I find acceptable, am I then willing to tell you the parts of Institute for Ecumenical and
my story about which I am embarrassed, about which I would really Cultural Research.

rather you not know?

We also need to be self-aware and
self-critical about why we remember what
we remember. Someone at “Ecumenism
Among Us” recalled one of the younger
participant’s saying, “I don’t know enough
about our past hostilities to want to be
apart from you.” The fact that ecumenical
professionals know a lot about the “past
hostilities” does not bestow on them the
right to declare open season on those who
do not. Moreover, we need to search out
memories that don’t so much need to be
reconciled as to be acknowledged. At an
Institute consultation one participant said,
commenting on another’s paper, “Your
feelings about the experience of your
church and mine—your anger and my
fondness—are probably the most distant
300 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

from each other in the entire group; but reading what you have writ¬
ten, I sense a kindred spirit.” The memories of these two were not in
conflict; they had simply never intersected before.
The severest test today of our ability to reconcile memories is sig¬
naled in the title of Elisabeth Schiissler Fiorenzas book In Memory of
Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins. The
flowering of scholarship on the history of women in the Christian tradi¬
tion has begun to redress a huge imbalance. The real question, though, is
not whether women have been important in the tradition, but whether
the memories will be, can be, reconciled. The future of Christian unity
depends on many things; among the most profound is the reconciling of
the memories of men and women in the church. And womens memo¬
ries go back a long way, to times when the divine was mainly female,
when patriarchy was not “natural,” not “the way things are.”
Popular ecumenism, at least as I have witnessed it and taken part
in it, is remarkably immune to the virus of caution. When sentiments
like “What’s the rush?” “What will we lose by taking more time to think
through the implications?” get in the way of action, people get irritated,
even angry. Of course, there are always more reasons not to do some¬
thing than to do something. The argument was put classically by F. M.
Cornford at the beginning of the twentieth century, in what he called
“The Principle of the Dangerous Precedent”: “Every public action which
is not customary, either is wrong, or, if it is right, is a dangerous prec¬
edent. It follows that nothing should ever be done for the first time.”41
Reconciling memories means very little, and finally nothing, if we are
not prepared to risk, even to risk making mistakes, together. Without
such risk taking, we will miss the promise lurking in one of the pro-
foundest of Yogi Berras koans: “The future ain’t what it used to be.”
Reconciling memories is not just a device to achieve a goal, nor
is ecumenism a method to be jettisoned when the goal is reached.
Ecumenism, and reconciling memories, are ways of being in the
world; they are human character traits; they are virtues. We reconcile
memories not mainly to solve problems, but to become people who
reconcile memories.
Because the memories that count, the ones that call powerful emo¬
tions into play, have more to do with people than with doctrines, we
need a project to be called “Each Other’s Saints.” We need to know—
from the hearts as well as from the heads of our sisters and brothers
 Ecumenism of the People | Henry 301

in other rooms of God’s house—whom they revere, treat as exemplars,

and why. We need a new, expanded family album. The most compel¬
ling example of this I have ever seen followed a meeting in which, on
the Feast Day of the Assumption, some Catholics led prayer, and Paul
Bassett, a member of the Church of the Nazarene, in the Wesleyan
Holiness tradition, felt acutely uncomfortable. But he said to himself,
“These are people I know and love, and I owe it to them and myself
to learn why this day means so much to them.” He went to the library
and checked out several autobiographies by Catholics, to learn how
their hearts and minds work.

EXPERIENCE, SERIOUSNESS, REVOLUTION

The popular history of ecumenism—or the history of popular ecu¬
menism—is not easy to sum up, but the conclusion to a chapter on the
subject in this unprecedented People’s History of Christianity has to
try. Popular ecumenism has three features that define its character and
make it a source of tenacious hope for the church—and for individual
Christians, many of whom have an uneasy suspicion that Christian
identity may not be good for people because it seems to require build¬
ing walls when what the world needs is bridges.
First, popular ecumenism is experientially based. In the early
church—the first thousand years or so—bishops were more like pas¬
tors than they are now, and the bishops were the professors. That is,
the shapers of theology were in regular, unremitting contact with ordi¬
nary Christians. Augustine, the most formidable of the lot, preached
virtually every Sunday for decades to the same people. We do not
have much direct access to what those people themselves thought and
talked about, but we have every reason to think that Augustine and
his ilk knew what those people thought and talked about, and shaped
their theology accordingly. Early Christian theology can appear
remote and abstract to us, but this is because our imaginations are
too cramped. Those early documents are experientially based, and it
is not a stretch to say that twentieth-century popular ecumenism is a
restoration, a return, a retrieval of the early church’s way of expressing
“what the church of Jesus Christ believes, teaches, and confesses on
the basis of the word of God.”42 “What seems hopeful to me are efforts
302 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

to minister to persons in their work and living environments: at air¬

ports, shopping malls, hospitals, on the street, at vocational training
institutions, in support groups.”43
Second, and following on the first, popular ecumenism is theo¬
logically serious. More than once I have heard and read dismissals of
popular ecumenism by learned scholars who say that it is not rigorous
enough, too ready to “compromise” theological principle, a “going along
to get along” tolerance. Such high-handedness is called to account by
the Bibles frequent reminders
that the learned and the self-
styled wise are often foolish in
God’s sight. Popular ecumen¬
ism as I have encountered it has
an uncanny knack for raising
crucial questions about settled
answers and proposing answers
to convoluted questions. A Pen¬
tecostal Christian noted that his
tradition originated at the same
time as the ecumenical move¬
ment, “but we were for the most
Fig. 12.3. Workshop in part found among the disenfranchised of society. While the ecumeni¬
the Ecumenical Community
cal movement drafted documents, we prayed down fire from heaven
of Taize in France, August
14,2004. Photo © Pascal and experienced wondrous moments of community.”44
Deloche/Godong/Corbis.
Third, popular ecumenism is practically revolutionary. By this I
Used by permission.
mean that it generates sparks, it fuels initiatives, and once it is set
in motion, it is very hard to stop. Popular ecumenism brings people
together and keeps them together. “I’m scared as an individual; but
what if all of you come with me?”45
I was once invited to speak to a group of laypeople from several
denominations who had first gathered in the immediate aftermath of
the Second Vatican Council, in one of what were called “living room
dialogues.” This group had continued to meet once each month for
forty years. They were living testimony to the conviction that “the
boundaries that divide the churches can be approached, and some¬
times crossed, only if there is personal contact among credible people
of good will committed to the vision of the church’s unity.” “We need
to be affected by the dreams and thoughts of others—to be in constant
 Ecumenism of the People I Henry 303

realignment of our own views. This does not mean that we must all
agree, just that we all must be willing to learn. And to learn, we must
be willing to accept that we know nothing.”46
An especially revolutionary instance of popular ecumenism
occurred in 1993 to mark the halfway point in a World Council of
Churches program called “Ecumenical Decade: Churches in Solidar¬
ity with Women.” The whole point of the conference, “Re-Imagining,”
was to re-imagine the tradition, not to invent something new or revive
old “heresies.” Two thousand women and two hundred men affirmed,
together, that Christian worship, Christian thought, and Christian
community are not a male preserve. Christian imagery, patterns of
thought, and rituals can draw deep from the wellspring of womens
experience and knowledge.
Many Christians, mostly men but some women, in the aftermath
of the conference declared that the people gathered in Minneapolis,
Minnesota, had in those four days broken with the Christian tradi¬
tion. In several denominations that had provided money to support
the event, the conference became a flash point. The Presbyterian
Church nearly split over the question, “Should we have had anything
to do with ‘Re-Imagining’?” Jobs were lost, contributions withheld.
To be sure, there was unfamiliar imagery, some from the female
body, in the conference worship, but it didn’t matter to the detractors
that Genesis 1 says male and female are made in the image of God. To
be sure, Sophia, the Wisdom of God, was often invoked, but it didn’t
matter to the detractors, who denounced “goddess worship,” that
Sophia comes straight out of the Bible.
What strikes me as so strange about the virulent church responses
to “Re-Imagining” is their failure to see that the people gathered in
Minneapolis weren’t radicals—they were the conservatives, the ones
still willing, in spite of the deplorable record of the churches in the
treatment of women, in spite of the patriarchalism of the Bible, to stay
with the Christian tradition.47 In fact, “Re-Imagining” was in con¬
tinuity with the classic expression of Christian women’s ecumenical
spirituality, Church Women United:

Worship, study, celebration, action.... When CWU identifies these

as its context of involvement, it envisions them not as stages of a
linear journey but in a circular configuration. No starting point,
304 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

no ending. One grows out of another, leads to another, derives

strength from another, gives strength to another, much as the local,
state and national units of CWU interact.... The style is easy to
accept if they see themselves within the larger human sphere and
are committed to a circle to which there always is access.48

“No starting point, no ending.” Revolution continues. A peoples

history of ecumenism, as it looks forward at the beginning of the
twenty-first century, opens onto new vistas of
interreligious encounter. The presence of rab¬
Healing the Divisions
bis and imams and yogis and dharma masters
When I look at the divisions among us,
at bishops’ retirement parties may become as
I wonder what could possibly bring
us together in the oneness for which normal as the presence of clergy of other Chris¬
Jesus prayed—a oneness that would tian denominations. Some Christians recoil in
be a witness to the world. Then I recall horror from such a prospect, but as John Henry
the fellowship between my mother, Cardinal Newman said in the nineteenth century,
raised Dutch Reformed and become “To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have
Baptist, and Stella, our devout Roman changed often.”49 Interreligious dialogue is still
Catholic neighbor. They loved and in its infancy, but it is likely that people will be
worshiped the same God. Despite ahead of their leaders. One harbinger of things to
differences in doctrine and practice,
come was a project of the Collegeville Institute in
they both knew the same forgiveness
1999 and 2000, “Living Faithfully in the United
of sins, the same mercy and grace, the
States Today,” that involved Buddhists, Chris¬
same source of joy and love and hope
tians, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, and Midewiiwin
and peace. The "what" that brings us
(Ojibwa). The events report notes in the introduc¬
together is really a "Who." The work
of regathering is a work of God. tion: “There is another way, in which academic
—Esther Byle Bruland, Regathering: learning or professional expertise is not the most
The Church from "They" to "We" important tool. It is the way of conversation, of
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 7. story telling, of giving a first person account of
one’s own life.”50 People become caretakers of one
another’s stories.

UNFINISHED BUSINESS
It remains sadly true, as one of the greatest ecumenists of the twenti¬
eth century, Albert C. Outler, lamented shortly before his death, that
 Ecumenism of the People | Henry 305

an aim of ecumenism remains stubbornly unrealized: “I had hoped,”

he said to me, “to live to see Christians gathered together at the table
of the Lord.” The circles of eucharistic fellowship have expanded as a
result of the ecumenical movement, but they are far from congruent
circles. But this is “official” talk. Multitudes of Christians have spoken a
different word through their practice—going forward for communion,
or taking the elements from the tray, despite the formal prohibitions,
whether those in charge say “whoever is not of our flock isn’t welcome”
or “if you’re in our flock, ours is the only table you should come to.”
“Jesus ate with everyone. Why can’t we?” asked a participant in
“Ecumenism Among Us.” And another reported, “We have made a

Figs. 12.4 and 12.5.

Mennonite/Presbyterian
Yoked Fellowship in Don-
nellson, Iowa, which has a
very active "Presmonite"
Youth Group. The church
buildings of Donnellson
Presbyterian Church (left)
and Zion Mennonite Church
(left, below) are shared
by a single congregation,
who worship and have
Sunday School together but
maintain separate boards
and finances. The congrega¬
tion alternates every four
months between the two
church building (chang¬
ing on February 1st, June
1st, and October 1st every
year, which means Easter
and Christmas are always
alternated). Photos by John
Gorham. Courtesy of Zion
Mennonite Church and
Donnellson Presbyterian
Church.
306 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

deliberate theological choice to form a house church, because the bot¬

tom line is this: the eucharist is so important that we cannot starve to
death. We cannot let ourselves go hungry while the churches hold the
eucharist hostage.” Here at the end of this chapter, as at the beginning
is the ecumenical “cannot.” “Some issues are resolved by the people
long before the institutions resolve them.”51
On this, more than on any other popular expression of ecumen¬
ism, theologians tend to pass critical judgment. Such behavior appears
to them grounded in sentimentality, evidence of emotion trumping
careful thought and established doctrine. But in a religion that values
love over even faith and hope, it is not self-evidently true that doctrine
should always win. One of the illuminating moments in church history
was Athanasius’s recognition that people whom those on his side had
been accusing of heresy were saying virtually the same thing he was
but using different terms.521 suspect there were ordinary Christians in
Athanasius’s time who figured this out before he did, who knew that
their neighbors and friends and wives and husbands, who expressed
the faith differently from the way they did, were not enemies of God
and were in fact inhabitants of the household of faith—people about
whom they would say, “We cannot believe that God hates them.” The
fourth century was not the first time in the church’s history, nor will
the twenty-first be the last, when hierarchs and others in authority
need to carry a banner saying, “We are their leaders, and we must run
to catch up with them.”

FOR FURTHER READING

Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry. Faith and Order Paper 111. Geneva: World Council
of Churches, 1982.
Bilheimer, Robert S. Breakthrough: The Emergence of the Ecumenical Tradition. Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989.
Lossky, Nicholas, et al„ eds. Dictionary of the Ecumenical Movement, 2nd edition.
Geneva: WCC Publications, 2002.
Kelley, Arleon, ed. A Tapestry of Justice, Service, and Unity: Local Ecumenism in the
United States, 1950-2000. Tacoma, Wash.: National Association of Ecumenical and
Interreligious Staff Press, 2004.
O’Gara, Margaret. The Ecumenical Gift Exchange. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical, 1998.
GENDER AND TWENTIETH-
CENTURY CHRISTIANITY

MARGARET BENDROTH
CHAPTER THIRTEEN

O n a cold winter Sunday in 1977, Pauli Murray led Holy Eucharist

for the first time, standing in the chapel where her grandmother
had once been baptized as a slave. The moment resonated with histor¬
ical significance. Murray was one of the first women to be ordained by
the American Episcopal Church, a veteran of a long and bruising bat¬
tle for equal rights. That morning she stood behind a lectern engraved
with the name of Mary Ruffin Smith, the wealthy white woman who
had once owned Murray’s grandmother Cornelia and who had built
the chapel many years before. The sanctuary overflowed with local
and national network media—even Charles Kuralt of the CBS pro¬
gram On the Road was on hand to record the event—and a joyous
interracial congregation of family, friends, and supporters. At that
moment, as Murray recalled in her memoir, Song in a Weary Throat,
“all the strands of my life had come together.... I was empowered to
minister the sacrament of One in whom there is no north or south, no
black or white, no male or female—only the spirit of love and recon¬
ciliation drawing us all toward the goal of human wholeness.”1
This small but significant moment of transformation is a good
place to begin the story of gender and Christianity in the twentieth
century. As she stood in that North Carolina chapel, Pauli Murray
metaphorically demolished nearly every social category imaginable,
breaking down old barriers of race as well as social class, and two
millennia of established Christian custom barring women from the
priesthood. Moreover, during the course of the late twentieth century,
her act of hope and defiance was repeated many times over around the

307
308 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

world, as women stepped into new public roles as pastors, theologians,

and church leaders. An age-old pattern of predominantly male leader¬
ship in Christian churches appeared to be rapidly nearing its end. By
the turn of the century, large ecumenical gatherings brought together
women from Africa, Asia, and Europe and across the Western Hemi¬
sphere to reconsider Christianity’s egalitarian message and its influence
on the oldest human divide, the one separating male from female.
In many ways, therefore, Pauli Murray’s life is emblematic of the
much larger story of religion and gender in the twentieth century.
There is no denying that a narrative of liberation makes sense for this
subject—the past hundred years have seen many vivid accounts of
hope and struggle, achievement and success. Pauli Murray’s moment
of personal triumph encapsulates a whole host of positive changes
brought about in the twentieth century.
Of course she does not stand for all. A people’s history of the twen¬
tieth century, almost by definition, directs our gaze away from solitary
achievements, however dramatic, toward the broad range of human
experience. Across the dauntingly diverse world of modern Chris¬
tianity, most women continued to sit in pews and work in kitchens,
as their mothers and grandmothers had done for many years before.
With limited opportunities for education or leadership, acceptance
into ordained ministry was, for many if not most, neither an option
nor a dream.
But Pauli Murray’s personal battle does open up a useful line of
thinking about the complicated dynamics of gender and the larger
structures of human experience that historians and anthropologists
have documented across time and geography. In that sense, her long
trip to the front altar was not just a confrontation with a particular
ecclesiastical power structure, but a struggle against deeply rooted
social ideologies about women’s proper place. What a given culture
considers to be “feminine” or “masculine” varies constantly across
time and distance; the simple fact of biological difference admits
endless nuance in meaning. Moreover, because of their basic interest
in family stability and the ordered transmission of belief across gen¬
erations, religious communities play a central role in shaping gender
expectations. They have at their disposal a range of tools—myth and
symbol and proscriptive texts—to enforce boundaries between male
 Gender and Twentieth-Century Christianity I Bendroth 309

and female roles, and as we shall see, to critique

existing cultural patterns. In the twentieth cen¬
Feminists Changing the Churches
tury, therefore, the intersection of religion and Aware of the limitations on the range
gender was often a deep tangle. of options open to women in the past,
To begin with, there is no simple way to mainstream Christian feminists—
describe twentieth-century Christianity. Clearly, both scholars and ministers—see
the events of the past hundred years have baffled the church as a significant cultural
the expectations of even the most acute observ¬ force in forming the attitudes, self-

ers. With the resurgence of Pentecostal churches understandings, and expectations of

and the rise of Catholic lay movements all around women—and of men—and of society
itself. They are deeply conscious of
the world, the case for secularization seems thin
the damage that the churches have
at best. Modern Christianity never slowed down
done to women, in the theologies,
or disappeared, as an earlier generation of soci¬
the language, and the structures
ologists had once predicted; in Latin America,
that have kept women in a narrowly
Africa, and Asia, it continued to grow and gather
defined "place." They are determined
converts, sometimes in unprecedented, almost to change the churches, radically.
unimaginable numbers. In Africa, for example, They refuse to leave. Perhaps they
the percentage of Christians grew from about are more revolutionary than those
9 percent in 1900 (around ten million) to over who have given up. They refuse to
45 percent by 2000 and should be close to half ignore the liberating, indeed revolu¬
the continent by 2025, over 633 million. South tionary, message that the churches

Korea, a nation closed to the West until the late bear about the realm of justice, peace,

nineteenth century, could be nearly 80 percent and equality coming in the future but,
as the gospel proclaims, even now
Christian by 2025. Even in thoroughly modern¬
being born among us.
ized societies like the United States, religion of
—Anne E. Carr, Transforming Grace:
every kind continues to flourish. With a religious
Christian Tradition and Women's
adherence rate of over 60 percent, the United
Experience (San Francisco:
States is (statistically at least) one of the most reli¬
Harper & Row, 1988), 18.
gious nations in the world.2
It is more accurate to say that over the past
hundred years, Christianity has decentered. Once a predominantly
Western church, Christianity has become a truly worldwide faith,
with the majority of the world’s Christians now living outside the
United States, Canada, and Europe. By 1980 the “average” Christian
was young, brown, female, and living in the Southern Hemisphere.
But demographics do not even begin to tell the story. Over the past
century, religion of all types has become more contested, more
310 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

privatized and personal, with an increasingly tenuous hold on the

public square. Though the human tendency to doubt is hardly new,
public skepticism about religion is no longer checked by social cus¬
tom or intellectual defense. At the very least, the story of modern
Christianity is far more layered and tragic, more triumphant and
mysterious than any one-dimensional narrative of progress—or
decline—could ever encompass.
Even more daunting is the problem of generalizing about the
lives of ordinary believers. Women, for example, form a solid major¬
ity of Christian believers: in the United States they have consistently
comprised two-thirds of all church members, and in newer areas of
Christian expansion their numbers are even higher. In Chinese house
churches, Latin American Pentecostal churches, and African indig¬
enous churches, the proportion of women is 70 to 80 percent.3 Despite
the universal themes in Pauli Murrays story, she can hardly speak for
the multitude. The average church woman is not behind a pulpit on
Sunday morning, but busy in the parish kitchen or in other less vis¬
ible forms of service. Indeed, in terms of statistical realities, the truth
about gender and twentieth-century Christianity is deeply embedded
in the regular, often invisible rhythms of local church and parish life.
Generalizations are difficult—but they are not impossible. While
there is no single narrative of gender and twentieth-century Christi¬
anity, it is not difficult to locate a few common themes. Obviously, for
women all over the world the emergence of second-wave feminism in
the 1970s and 1980s had a fundamental, permanent effect on church
politics; controversies over womens right to ordination have roiled
probably every religious body at some point in the last thirty years. In
the workplace, home and family life, and countless personal relation¬
ships, feminism has deeply altered the expectations of both men and
women.
But there are also deeper themes at play, fundamental to second-
wave feminism but older and more universal. In a broad sense the
history of gender and religion in the twentieth century is about the
differential effect of modern individualism. The power to define
oneself is, of course, a central motif in the history of Western civi¬
lization, easily traceable through the Renaissance and Reformation,
the Enlightenment, and the modern era. Even the most overworked
 Gender and Twentieth-Century Christianity I Bendroth 311

undergraduate is probably mercifully unaware of the countless num¬

ber of books, paintings, and poems that have been devoted to the
quest for personal autonomy. In the twentieth-century the discus¬
sion became if anything more intense, as scholars and social critics
labored to analyze the effects of “expressive individualism,” where
the old demand for personal freedom is increasingly unhindered by
traditional social forms. The debate was much broader than a simple
liberal-conservative divide; sometimes it invoked
conservative critiques of feminism and warnings
about the future of the family, and at others it The Individual in Modern Times
centered on the future of participatory democracy A half-century ago the family took
under the atomizing force of modern technologi¬ precedence over the individual; now

cal, political, and economic change. the individual takes precedence over

All too rarely, however, did the debate recog¬ the family. The individual once was an
intrinsic partof his or herfamily. Private
nize the added complexities of gender and reli¬
life was secondary, subordinate, and
gion. Certainly most people are aware that even in
in many cases secret or marginal.
the most technologically driven societies, women
Now the relation of individual to family
still temper their desire for personal autonomy
has been reversed. Today, except for
with the competing demands of home and family,
maternity, the family is nothing more
sometimes by choice and sometimes by necessity. than a temporary meeting place for its
And it has become equally clear that, especially for individual members. Each individual
men in modernizing societies, the gift of individ¬ lives his or her own life and in so doing
ual freedom can also be an insupportable burden. expects support from a now informal
The absentee fathers and stressed breadwinners of family. A person who considers his or
the late-twentieth century signify a growing crisis her family suffocating is free to seek

around the role of men—to the point that popular more rewarding contacts elsewhere.

pundits and social scientists ask, only half in jest, Private life used to coincide with fam¬
ily life; now the family is judged by the
whether men are even “necessary” to the future of
contribution it makes to the individual
the human race.
private lives of its members.
The Christian tradition has all too seldom
—Antoine Prost,
addressed these issues in depth. More typically it
"The Family and the Individual,"
has followed dominant cultural models, assign¬
in Antoine Prost and Gerard Vincent,
ing women the obligation of self-sacrifice and eds., A History of Private Life.
men the power to lead, regardless of the strain Vol. 5, Piddles of Identity
this might impose on both. But over the course in Modern Times
of the twentieth century, genuine Christian cri¬ (Cambridge: Belknap, 1991), 84.
tique of modern individualism, recognizing its
312 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

vastly differential effects on mens and womens lives, slowly began to

emerge. Though the specific contours of male and female roles have
changed over time, and vary across geographic and cultural contexts,
the questions are broadly similar: Does Christianity liberate women?
Can—and should—a Christian woman or man operate as a free,
autonomous individual? And what kinds of obligations does Christian
faith impose on men? Pauli Murrays moment of public triumph dem¬
onstrates the hope—and the reality—of reconciliation across many
historic divides. But as this chapter suggests, the debate is far from
simple and far from over.

THE FAMILY CLAIM

In the late nineteenth century, the American social reformer Jane
Addams coined the term “the family claim” to describe the problem
besetting the young women of her generation. Even though opportu¬
nities for education and meaningful employment had been growing
throughout the post-Civil War era, opting out of marriage and moth¬
erhood still took personal courage. “Any attempt that the individual
woman formerly made to subordinate or renounce the family claim,”
Addams observed, “was inevitably construed to mean ... that she was
setting up her own will against that of her family. ... It was concluded
that she could have no larger motive, and her attempt to break away
was therefore selfish.”4
Three-quarters of a century before the emergence of second-
wave feminism, the debate over marriage and career was already old
and familiar. In the rapidly industrializing, pluralistic world of early
twentieth-century American culture, many women were already well-
versed in the struggle between personal fulfillment and the demands
of family. Enormous cultural tension centered in the fact that though
women’s domestic responsibilities were lessening, their presence in
the home still carried heavy symbolic weight.
If womens role was beset by competing certainties, the role of
men seemed disconcertingly vague. The Victorian father was the
undisputed head of the family but had no obvious function in the
private sphere; by the turn of the century, even his religious obligation
 Gender and Twentieth-Century Christianity I Bendroth 313

to lead in family devotions was falling into disuse. Not surprisingly

perhaps, church leaders regularly bemoaned the absence of men at
Sunday services and worried about the long hours spent at work away
from the arms of wife and children. It hardly seems stretching the
point to suggest that a great deal of the social tensions around women’s
proper place was rooted in deeper anxieties about late nineteenth-
century masculinity.
In the late nineteenth century, much of the difficulty stemmed
from the widespread cultural assumption that gender differences were
fixed, immutable, and primary. Before modern people learned to think
of male and female in more physiological terms, as a complex func¬
tion of genetics, hormones, and social environment, most Western
Christians assumed the two categories were fundamentally spiritual,
especially in the case of women. A woman was not just someone with
a female body or a certain social status but, as one historian has put
it, “thoroughly sexed through all the regions of [her] being.”5 Nine¬
teenth-century Victorians read all kinds of psychological, intellectual,
and religious implications into the basic fact of biological difference.
Indeed, according to influential Protestant theologian Horace Bush-
nell, men and women were so different in both soul and body “that
they are a great deal more like two species, than like two varieties.”6
As the twentieth century opened, most Western Christians, both
Protestant and Catholic, assumed that women’s nature was funda¬
mentally domestic and inherently religious. While men’s aggressive,
dominating temperament pushed them into the public sphere of
government, business, and politics, women’s gifts of modesty and pas¬
sivity suited them for the private realm. That division of labor was, to
be sure, a middle-class ideal that hardly described the lives of many
poor or working-class women; yet it also reflected a significant social
reality. By the opening of the twentieth century, opportunities for
meaningful, self-supporting employment for women were relatively
few, and church work attracted talented, ambitious women in large
numbers. Indeed, while male participation lagged, Christian service
gradually became the most important means by which women in the
industrializing Western world could achieve leadership and expertise,
without the appearance of selfish ambition. As Methodist women con¬
templated forming a missionary society in 1869, one that in just four
314 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

decades would boast a budget of over $800,000,

Women and Missions they defended their ambitious dream as “God’s

Men have been the gatekeepers of voice speaking to us—for who can so well do
the institutional church and theories this work as we? Does it not seem as though the
about its relation to mission. Women responsibility were thus laid directly on us? And
have rather concerned themselves shall we shrink from bearing it?”7
with the personal and ethical aspects In fact, even the ecclesiastical differences
of mission. Put another way women's between Protestant laywomen and Catholic sisters
mission theory focused either on per¬ obscured important similarities in womens roles.
sonal witnessing or on working toward
At the turn of the century, many a Catholic parish
the reign of God. Church planting and
depended on the quiet participation of laywomen
the subsequent relationship between
in devotional rituals and the religious training
church and mission was rarely part of
of children. And they depended as well on the
women's public missiological agenda.
unstinting labors of many thousands of nuns, who
Even if women planted mission
churches in practice, suitable men
provided the regular unpaid service that made
took over the pastoral work as soon as brick-and-mortar Catholicism such a long-term
possible... .Women were innovators success. Indeed, the model Catholic woman, like
in making personal connections with the model Protestant one, was a willing servant.
indigenous people forthe sake of shar¬ Her role was fundamentally domestic, either as
ing the gospel—adopting orphans to a mother at home or as a Sister carrying out an
teach them about Christianity, initiating equivalent labor in a school or hospital.
house to house friendship evange¬ In the decades after the Civil War, many
lism among secluded women in zena¬
American Protestant women learned to negotiate
nas and harems, living two by two in
the demands of the family claim and cement their
pueblos jovenes among the people
leading role in Christian service by organizing for
they went to serve. From Ann Judson
foreign missions. Barred from preaching in the
befriending the wives of high Burmese
mission field or from leading roles in denomi¬
officials to Gertrude Howe setting up
house to support her Chinese proteges
national missionary agencies, separate womens
attending American medical school, groups proved a hugely successful alternative.
the interpersonal side of mission work By the early twentieth century, women from a
often wore a female face. broad range of Protestant denominations in North
—Dana Robert, American Women America and Europe had established national
in Mission: A Social History of Their organizations dedicated to training, funding, and
Thought and Practice (Macon, Ga.: supporting independent female missionaries.
Mercer University Press, 1996), They staked their claim to an entirely separate
409-10.
mission field, arguing that only women could
reach the heart of non-Christian cultures, through
 Gender and Twentieth-Century Christianity I Bendroth 315

the medium of the home. By the turn of the century, “womans mis¬
sion to woman” was all but eclipsing earlier efforts led by men and
proving itself a powerful (if not deeply ambiguous) means of export¬
ing both Christianity and Western culture to growing missionary
fields in Africa and Asia.
This meant that, for women, Christianity expanded out of its his¬
torical Western base as both a conservative force and a modernizing
one. Arriving inextricably linked to the aggressive agenda of European
and American imperialists, it both affirmed womens traditional, sub¬
servient domestic role and inexorably undermined it. Female mis¬
sionaries insisted that true
Christianity was insepara¬
ble from a clean, well-main¬
tained home and obedient,
well-educated children—yet
their own busy, indepen¬
dent lives belied that sim¬
ple formula. Though often
couched in pious phrases,
their core message was
that Christianity liberated
women from “heathen deg¬
radation” and subservience
to men. Firm believers in
the superiority of Western
ways, and of the Christian faith, they established schools, clinics, and Fig. 13.1. Lecture on "Caring
for your Baby," Nanking,
hospitals that both elevated and undercut women’s commitment to
China. From Light and Life
the home. 49(1919).
Not surprisingly perhaps, Western missionaries enjoyed marked
success in gaining female converts—even when they tried not to.
To use just one fascinating example, among eastern Africa’s Maasai
people, a so-called church of women arose in spite of the stated prefer¬
ence of Roman Catholic Spiritan fathers for male converts. Reasoning
that male heads of households would provide the quickest and most
reliable inroad into Maasai society, the missionaries had begun work
in the early twentieth century establishing schools and community
centers designed to attract men rather than women.
316 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

But their efforts had the opposite effect. “The enthusiasm of

Maasai women for the Catholic Church,” wrote Dorothy Hodgson,
an anthropologist who has studied the Spiritan mission, “was all the
more surprising given the erratic and intermittent nature of religious
instruction, administration of the sacraments and pastoral care.” In a
world shaped by the demands of British colonizers, which placed a pre¬
mium on mens role as property owners and taxpayers, women found
church an important compensation. It offered them social space, a
place to socialize, share stories, and develop independence from men.
“In addition to providing opportunities for women to come together
collectively,” Hodgson writes, “the church provided formal and infor¬
mal leadership opportunities for women. Although men were usually
elected or appointed to the formal positions such as chairperson’ and
secretary’ (which required literacy skills and proficiency in Swahili),
women seemed to dismiss, ignore, or at best put up with the presumed
authority of these men.” In effect, Hodgson concludes, the Maasai
Catholic Church offered women social breathing room, allowing them
to both affirm the family claim and to subtly undermine it.8

SECOND-WAVE FAMILY CLAIM

During the last two decades of the twentieth century, the old question
of the family claim reemerged in Christian circles with new urgency
and force, spurred in part by the rise of second-wave feminism.
Clearly the movement fundamentally shaped the course of the twen¬
tieth century. Especially in its broader global context, women’s rising
aspirations brought about some epic social changes, as charismatic
figures like Indira Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto, and Corazon Aquino rose
to international leadership, and many lesser local female organizers
campaigned for equal rights in marriage, control of sexuality, and
access to employment. Though in some quarters changes were slow or
nonexistent, they have affected far more than the elite few; in one way
or another, women in every modern society have had to grapple with
the aspirations the movement unleashed.
But feminism was only one of the new forces affecting the lives
of ordinary people. In postindustrial economies like the United
 Gender and Twentieth-Century Christianity I Bendroth 317

States and Europe, the lines separating work and home—and male
and female—had begun to blur and cross each other in complex
ways. Technological changes like television, telephones, and com¬
puters removed all pretense of home as a sheltered enclave, sepa¬
rate from the secular bustle and flow of the outside world. (As one
American fundamentalist noted glumly of television in 1955, “The
boast of one network is that it ‘brings the world right into your
home.’ Who wants the world as we know it in our homes?”9) The
old nineteenth-century divisions of masculine and feminine, public
and private, simply made less sense under the fragmenting pressures
of modernity.
Economic pressures and rising aspirations also propelled more
and more women, including those with school-age children, into the
workplace. By the late 1990s, especially in areas of strong economic
growth like East and Southeast Asia, over 60 percent of adult women
participated in the labor force. Similarly, two-thirds of all mothers in
the United States had entered the work force in 1995, a figure that
included half of those with children under the age of two.10 Though
conservative churches often decried the erosion of womens domestic
responsibilities, they could hardly stem the tide of social change. Stud¬
ies showed that American evangelical women participated in the work
force in almost exactly the same proportion as the population at large;
the figure is also basically the same as that of women in more liberal
Protestant bodies.11
In the midst of such flux, academic theologians and grassroots
church leaders struggled to separate the permanent from the transi¬
tory. Were women naturally endowed with maternal gifts, and did
they imperil both themselves and the wider society by venturing
outside the home? Or were the old gendered divisions of labor merely
arbitrary social conventions? Social science offered few new certain¬
ties; viewed across time and social boundaries, gender categories
seemed eminently negotiable, defined more by cultural need than
biological necessity. But other scientific research delivered a contra¬
dictory word, discovering gender differences deeply fixed in genetics,
brain chemistry, and the complex mysteries of prenatal development.
What was natural and what was simply imposed by social convention
seemed almost impossible to separate.
318 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

Within the course of their daily lives, many men and women no
doubt experienced the rapid changes of the late twentieth century as
both freeing and harrowing, promising much but rarely delivering
as anticipated. In Christian circles, of course, the central drama was
women’s fight for ordination rights. Momentum began building after
the first meeting of the World Council of Churches in 1948 and the
call for an international forum on “The Life and Work of Women in
the Church.” Spurred by the ecumenical movements emphasis on
human rights and Christian “essentials,” centuries of arbitrary rules
against women in the pulpit slowly began to erode. In worldwide
Lutheranism, for example, the Slovakian church opened the ministry
to women in 1951, and Sweden did so in 1958. During the 1970s,
churches in North America, Latin America, and Asia also followed
suit, as did African Lutheran churches in the 1980s. By the end of the
twentieth century, some 68 percent of the bodies within the Lutheran
World Federation ordained women, with those numbers often being
matched in other denominations. In 1978, the Lambeth Conference
of the worldwide Anglican church allowed womens ordination in
Fig. 13.2. Barbara Harris at
principle and within ten years saw the first woman elevated to the
her consecration as bishop
in the Episcopal Church in office of bishop, when Barbara Harris was elected Suffragan Bishop
1989. Photo courtesy of the
of Massachusetts. Even among Roman Catholics, where womens
Office of Women's Minis¬
tries, Episcopal Church. ordination was long proscribed by law and custom, the Second Vati¬
can Council opened a range of par¬
ish leadership positions to women.
As in Protestant churches, women
dominated local leadership; in the
United States, according to one sur¬
vey, they accounted for a consistent
majority of the laypeople serving in
parish councils, eucharistic minis¬
try, and catechism classes.12
But timelines and percentages
hide as much as they reveal; prog¬
ress in achieving ordination rights
did not necessarily signal changes
in the traditional attitudes about
gender roles that affected women
 Gender and Twentieth-Century Christianity Bendroth 319

in church pews and kitchens. The overall thrust of papal teaching

on women, capsulized by Pope John Paul II’s 1988 encyclical “On
the Dignity and Vocation of Women,” emphasized women’s inherent
gifts for domesticity and service. “Woman can only find herself,” the
encyclical declared, “by giving love to others.” Ordination had no
justification in either church tradition or its understanding of scrip¬
ture; because Christ himself had called only men to the apostolic
succession, Roman Catholic teaching found no warrant for female
priests.
And in fact change was slow everywhere. By century’s end, even
in some of the more liberal American mainline churches, the per¬
centage of female clergy barely climbed above 15 percent, though
women routinely numbered more than half of seminary graduates.
Overall the proportion of female clergy had risen no higher than
that of women in police and fire departments, around 10 percent.
Female clergy also found themselves thwarted by a “stained-glass
ceiling” and the expectation that women’s primary responsibility to
the demands of husband and family would necessarily keep them in
smaller, less stable or influential parishes—yet another example of the
family claim’s continuing power. The slow progress of ordination in
local churches in fact signaled that the old gender-based division of
labor, with men in leadership and women in silent service, was still
very much in operation.
In the postcolonial world, the issues were even starker. In many
countries, foreign missionaries had left a legacy of commitment to
female education and had modeled the power of educated, indepen¬
dent women. But when Europeans and Americans relinquished their
mission stations in the decades following World War II, newly inde¬
pendent indigenous churches found themselves in a delicate position.
Conservative attitudes toward women persisted where the minority
status of Christian leaders made it difficult for them to challenge social
norms. But even more to the point, poverty and urbanization patterns
in Third World nations wreaked havoc on traditional family life, as the
shifting demands for migrant labor forced many men away from their
homes for months, even years on end.
During the 1980s and 1990s, perhaps the most concerted wres¬
tling with religion and the family claim came not from Western
320 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

feminists but from Christian women in Africa, Asia,

and Latin America. Observing the daily struggle of
women with poverty, war, and domestic violence,
they found it difficult to press for change. The
widespread image of Third World women as silent,
patient sufferers lionized their tenacity but also per¬
petuated a deeply ambiguous stereotype. As Indian
theologian Ranjini Rebera declared, “Self-sacrifice
is a daily reality of Asian women’s experience.”
Whether rich or poor, educated or uneducated,
rural or urban, high caste or low caste, professional
or unskilled, all women faced the social demand for
marriage and passive acts of selflessness.13
The Christian tradition often seemed an uncer¬
tain ally of change. The conversation at an Asian
consultation of Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox,
and Protestant theologians in 1978 turned quickly
to the gendered dimension of traditional caste struc¬
tures and the exploitation of women through dowry
Fig. 13.3. Woman evangelist exchanges—and ended with a critique of the missionary legacy. “Even
voI 19^9)Lightancl Llfe‘ the missions which established Churches in this country ... handed
down to us a tradition of womens inferior role,” one of the women
present declared. Though, on the one hand, the church had “always
proclaimed loudly the freedom and dignity of all human beings,” it
rarely acknowledged the contradiction in the traditional view “that
the subordinate role of women is the order of creation.”14
But older, pre-Christian ways posed even more complex chal¬
lenges. Although many women shared the concern of other Third
World theologians for an authentic indigenous Christianity, they
warned against resurrecting ancient traditions simply for the sake
of doing so. Dorothy Ramobide, a South African writer, spoke for
many when she declared that an uncritical acceptance of patriarchal
African ways “runs the risk of being party to the legitimization of the
domination of women.”15 Her hope was that women would not just
protest the errors of the past but play a central role in redefining his¬
toric Christian tradition. The overriding message of Christian women
outside the Western world was the need for a radical new look at the
 Gender and Twentieth-Century Christianity | Bendroth 321

Bible, taking the inherited tradition down to its

original root. African Women's Religious Roles
This made for interesting new wrinkles on the Religion is an area of life that seems
old family claim, as articulate women from tradi¬ to be able to escape public attention.
tional cultures struggled to speak both to and for It is also an area in which individuals
the many others they represented. To use just one may be intimidated to abdicate respon¬

telling example, in the late twentieth century the sibility for their own lives and to place
themselves and everybody else "in
old Christian discussion about polygamy took a
God's hands." This should not happen.
new twist. To be sure, the practice had long been
Christian feminists undertaking "God-
condemned by Western missionaries and also by
talk" must work for the liberation of
many feminists. But as one African woman theo¬
women from an image of God created
logian pointed out, none of these arguments took
for women by men. When examining
women’s point of view seriously. Christian mis¬ the role of women in religion in Africa—
sionaries had always been primarily concerned whether speaking of Christianity, Islam,
with persuading the male polygamist to choose or African traditional religions—we
just one wife and live only with her. But what must face two fundamental questions:
of the rest? Turning out a woman with children, what responsibilities do women have
who had been with one husband for many years, in the structures of religion? How does
was hardly merciful. “Since each of the wives is religion serve or obstruct women's

married only to one man,” this Christian feminist development?

—Mercy Amba Oduyoye and
critic wondered, “could they not be considered for
Musimbi R. A. Kanyoro, eds., The
baptism if they so desired?” Could not the wives
Will to Arise: Women, Tradition, and
in a polygamous marriage decide along with their
the Church in Africa (Maryknoll, N.Y.:
husband which of them would stand for Christian
Orbis Books, 1992), 10-11.
baptism?16 Was it actually possible that Christian
polygamy could exist in modern Africa?
The other rising conundrum of the late twentieth century con¬
cerned the role of men. By 1995, at a meeting of the Lutheran World
Federation in Geneva, the old pattern of male domination seemed
to have thoroughly turned, as the men present found themselves
suddenly and unmistakably in the minority. These men responded
in time-honored fashion, as many Christian women had a century
before, by holding a separate meeting to air their concerns and build
solidarity together. Though some of the men were ready to walk out at
that point, others urged them to stay and try to influence the proceed¬
ings. Most found the experience eye-opening—and deeply frustrating.
One Lutheran bishop later confessed to feeling “intimidated” by the
322 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

women on the podium, and “helpless and powerless because he was

not the one setting the agenda.” But he worked far enough through
his anger to conclude that “if the way he felt was the way women feel
when they are in the minority, then there was an urgent need to do
something about it.”17
The deeper problem, however, was that women simply were not
a minority in Christian churches—and had not been so for a long
time. If anything, the ferment of the late twentieth century had fixed
ordinary women more securely in the center of Christian activism and
had rendered men more marginal. Around the world and across many
communities, the preponderance of women and the general dearth of
men began to raise worries about the social, cultural, and theological
effects of religious “feminization.”

FUNDAMENTALISM
In the last half of the twentieth century, anxiety about gender found
forceful expression in fundamentalism. Especially after the rise of the
Taliban in Afghanistan and Islamicist revolutions across the Middle
East, the movement became synonymous with conservative views on
female sexuality and political rights; yet, in its deepest sense, funda¬
mentalism was not really about Islam, and it was less concerned with
proscribing the actions of women than it was with shoring up male
authority.
The term “fundamentalism” originated as description of a move¬
ment within American Protestantism, joining together conservative,
militant voices in response to social and theological changes in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “Fundamentalists” worried
about sliding standards in Christian doctrine and campaigned for a
return to basic statements of faith. They decried the loss of biblical
authority in an increasingly relativistic moral world, calling for godly
separation from the rampant social evils of their age.
But the issues were not just simple matters of correct or incorrect
doctrine: fundamentalist protest against secular culture also invoked
gender. Many American Protestant fundamentalists were openly criti¬
cal of women who forsook their appointed moral role, and during the
 Gender and Twentieth-Century Christianity | Bendroth 323

1920s, they rarely tired of calling down judgments on the “flappers”

and “vamps” who smoked and drank in public. They also rejected the
popular wisdom that women were more religious than men. Increas¬
ingly, fundamentalist diatribes invoked deeply negative portrayals
of women as untrustworthy temptresses and, in fact, as symbols of
worldly vanity and rebellion against God. The new gender paradigm,
emerging out of fundamentalism and exerting a slow but demon¬
strable influence across other religious communities, turned the old
one on its head. No longer the more virtuous sex, and the truest allies
of Christianity, women were its bitterest enemies. Godly leadership
therefore belonged first and foremost to men.
Recently, scholars and social critics have begun to talk about
fundamentalism as a global movement within all of the major world
religions. Bruce Lawrence has described it as a “religious ideology
of protest” against the forces of modernity: secular nationalism, the
rule of technological elites, and the moral relativism of consumer
capitalism. But fundamentalists have staged their battle with the
best weapons of communication that the latest technology affords,
using the resources of the modern world to stake their claim for tra¬
ditional values. They are, as Lawrence writes, “moderns, but not mod¬
ernists. ... at once the consequence of modernity and the antithesis
Fig. 13.4. A meeting of the
of modernism.”18 Promise Keepers, October
1997. Photo © Brooks Kraft/
The fundamentalist reassertion of the family claim, therefore, Sygma / Corbis. Used by
is both deeply conservative and sharply contemporary. When the permission.

Promise Keepers move¬

ment emerged in the United
States in the 1990s, bring¬
ing together thousands of
men in huge outdoor stadi¬
ums to repent of their sins
and confirm their commit¬
ment to family, some of its
most appreciative admirers
were feminists. To be sure,
the Promise Keepers rarely
missed an opportunity for
stereotypical language about
324 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

female dependency and male leadership, and at

Fundamentalism and the Family Claim times their public rhetoric raised angry protests.
In the face of... frustrations in But the most astute critics of the movement
dealing with external forces beyond noticed that a Promise Keeper dad, committed to
their control, fundamentalists have staying at home nights and sharing in child care
found themselves most able to effect and housework, was in many ways a feminists
significant change in interpersonal wish come true.
relations, especially within the family.
In poorer parts of the world, where father
Building upon existing inequalities
absence is a matter of survival, conservative evan¬
between women and men, patterns
gelical religion also played a somewhat para¬
of discrimination against women, and
doxical role. One study of Pentecostal churches
the exclusion of women from posi¬
in Colombia, for example, found that both men
tions of power, fundamentalists call
for a strengthening of prerogatives
and women were attracted by their highly tradi¬
for males and elders in the name of a tional teaching on male dominance and feminine
return to "tradition," sanctified as the submission. Pentecostal preachers insisted that
expression of God's will on earth. men were to be the head of the household, using
—Helen Hardacre, "The Impact of language drawn from a culture steeped in male
Fundamentalisms on Women, the machismo. Yet women recognized in that rhetoric
Family, and Interpersonal Relations," an opportunity for family stability. In the long
in Martin Marty and R. Scott Appleby, run it made men relatively immune to the more
eds., Fundamentalisms and Society:
destructive aspects of male culture and answer-
Reclaiming the Sciences, the Family,
able to the needs of their wives and children.
and Education (Chicago: University of
Pentecostal women found their standard of living,
Chicago Press, 1993), 138.
and their own prospects for success, improving as
a result of this gender ideology. Instead of buying
alcohol or tobacco, Pentecostal fathers brought home their weekly
paycheck; instead of spending evenings in bars and clubs, they were
busy at church.19
Much has been written on fundamentalism, and there is no doubt
much more waiting to be said. Few movements demonstrate so starkly
both the adaptability and the rigidity of religion in the modern world.
One of the best ways to understand the significance of fundamental¬
ism is to approach it as a parable. The literal meaning is not really the
point; who is to say whether fundamentalism is “good” or “bad” for
either women or men? The effects of its conservative gender ideol¬
ogy are far too ambiguous to allow for a simple conclusion. What’s
important is the underlying lesson. Clearly, fundamentalism taps
 Gender and Twentieth-Century Christianity | Bendroth 325

deeply into a classic modern problem, tempering the old masculine

prerogative of personal autonomy while pressing anew the old family
claim on women. And for that reason it is not likely to disappear any
time soon.

NEW UNDERSTANDINGS OF OLD IDEAS

Almost everything about ordinary life in the twentieth century seems
unprecedented: the unimaginable bloodbath of two world wars and a
succession of genocides, the constant flow of startling new technolo¬
gies, the births and deaths of nations, ethnic groups, animal species,
and intellectual paradigms. The world of 1900, comfortably Victorian
and dominated by Western hegemony, hardly seems real a hundred
years later, when so many easy assumptions have been laid bare by
violence and technological change.
Yet it is possible to see the “people’s story” of the twentieth
century, especially as it relates to religion and gender, as somehow
familiar. As the material in this essay suggests, the past one hundred
years or so have witnessed not simply the end of tradition but its
rediscovery. Contrary to our modern propensity for timelines and
horizontal charts, history rarely moves in a linear fashion. More often,
what appears to be change is actually a long, slow, three-dimensional
spiral; the illusion of forward movement is really a constant circling
back onto the same scenery, though each time with a slightly different
vantage point. Thus, what might look like the tired spectacle of old
battles being fought and refought could well be the work of a new set
of people on a quest for contemporary understanding.
There is no simple way to sum up such a long and complicated
story, especially one that encompasses so many disparate and invisible
personal lives. Perhaps it is best to step back finally and acknowledge
the obvious: the mysterious success of religion in the modern world
owes much to the vitality of our ongoing conversations around gender
and the meaning of personhood. Here emerge some of the deepest,
most puzzling questions about what it means to be human, to be at
once independent and responsive to the needs of others. It raises a
myriad of open queries about the family, both its present-day form
326 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

and its possible futures, refracted through a maze of cultural lenses.

It is a conversation almost guaranteed to be constantly new and con¬
stantly beyond the reach of easy answers.

FOR FURTHER READING

Carr, Anne E. Transforming Grace: Christian Tradition and Women’s Experience. San
Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988.
Clark, Elizabeth, and Herbert W. Richardson, eds. Women and Religion: The Original
Sourcebook of Women in Christian Thought. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco,
1996.
Fabella, Virginia, and Mercy Amba Oduyoye, eds. With Passion and Compassion: Third
World Women Doing Theology: Reflections from the Womens Commission of the
Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books,
1988.
Hardacre, Helen. “The Impact of Fundamentalisms on Women, the Family, and Inter¬
personal Relations.” In Martin Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds., Fundamentalisms
and Society: Reclaiming the Sciences, the Family, and Education, 129-50. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Melton, J. Gordon, ed. The Churches Speak On: Womens Ordination. Detroit: Gale
Research, 1991.
Oduyoye, Mercy Amba, and Musimbi R. A. Kanyoro, eds. The Will to Arise: Women,
Tradition, and the Church in Africa. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1992.
Prost, Antoine, and Gerard Vincent, eds. A History of Private Life. Vol. 5, Riddles of
Identity in Modern Times. Cambridge: Belknap, 1991.
Robert, Dana. American Women in Mission: A Social History of Their Thought and Prac¬
tice. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1996.
Strawley, John H., ed. Fundamentalism and Gender. New York: Oxford University Press,
1993.
CANADIAN WORKERS
AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

OSCAR COLE-ARNAL
CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE PROTESTANT SOCIAL GOSPEL

Farm and Factory

On December 18, 1901, angry farmers gathered in the Canadian

Pacific Railroad (CPR) town of Indian Head, Northwest Territories
(Saskatchewan province by 1905).1 There in this rail point (population
1,545), they began organizing the Territorial Grain Growers’ Asso¬
ciation (TGGA), which came to fruition in February of the following
year. So began the grassroots upsurge that came to be called the social
gospel in Canada. Strain between the independent wheat farmers on
one side and the railroad barons, Grain Exchange (Winnipeg), eastern
banks, and the international grain market on the other had been grow¬
ing from harvest to harvest. All too soon, the farmers had come to
realize that they were victims of the railroad monopoly, which owned
the grain elevators as well. In this situation, grain-loading prices were
manipulated by CPR operatives to pay farmers as little as possible in
order to extract higher profit levels. Price manipulations and false
weights were not uncommon. However, the fiasco around the harvest
of 1901 put the torch to the powder keg of farm rage. A massive bum¬
per crop of wheat arrived to be loaded on the trains or stored in the
grain elevators. The CPR system at every level failed to provide for this
wheat boom. By the end of the year the farmers had half their harvest
(thirty billion bushels) spoiling in their own hands.

327
328 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

In this conflict the TGGA came to life, and a local farm leader,
W. R. Motherwell, became its leader. From that point until the
Depression, farmers organized to fight the economic and political
elites via trial-and-error methods in the name of cooperation versus
competition. These farmers learned the hard way, moving from one
struggle to another until the 1920s, by which time they had created
various provincial organizations, press organs, cooperative marketing
strategies, and their own grain elevators and companies. Finally, they
organized politically, and they helped form governments in Ontario
(1919) and Alberta (1921). Indeed, this latter administration was the
first in Canada to give a ministry to a woman, the social gospel activist
Louise McKinney. Throughout these farm struggles the language that
shaped this evolving movement came from an increasingly popular
Protestant optimism known as the social gospel.2
To be sure, certain Protestant theological liberals in central Canada
had already demanded a Christian faith more open to social change,
but these voices (Methodist, Presbyterian, and Anglican) reflected
British and American borrowings within tight academic circles and
the editorial pages of denominational magazines. Initially they were
only refined utterances within comfortable discussion circles, until the
Protestant call for social change emerged from western grain farm¬
ers, workers in urban railway centers, and independent labor unions
from the major Prairie cities. Without these massive socioeconomic
and political pressure points, the social gospel would have remained
an ivory tower phenomenon, but the rapidly expanding prairies, with
their increasing class tensions, gave opportunity for the melding of
certain religious values with social conflict that brought a unique twist
to this Protestant social Christianity in English-speaking Canada.
Until the Canadian Pacific Railway had crossed the vast land mass
of Canada in 1885, the national identity lived in the minds of a few
visionaries. The new federal government, created through a series of
regional deals, came to official birth by a British parliamentary act in
1867. The recently knighted Sir John A. MacDonald became Canadas
first prime minister. Part visionary, part pragmatist, MacDonald
began a pattern of government-private partnerships with bankers and
railroad barons that he and subsequent leaders would use to build a
nation. With the government funding railway companies against risk,
 Canadian Workers and Social Justice | Cole-Arnal 329

those same bankers and rail

entrepreneurs began to link
Canadas vast land mass by
ribbons of steel. Of course, the
railroads made demands from
their government to insure
profitability. These included a
vast cheap labor force to bring
natural resources to rail load¬
ing points and urban con¬
glomerations that served as
storehouses and manufactur¬
ing centers to build and repair
railway rolling stock. Fig. 14.1. "The Mercy of His
Friends" cartoon by Arch
These goals were accomplished in two ways. The federal govern¬ Dale, from Grain Growers'
ment, with its new Prairie provincial counterparts, ignited a massive Guide, September 22,1920.
Photo courtesy Provincial
public relations campaign to lure immigrants from eastern Canada Archives of Manitoba.
and abroad. Clifford Sifton, the minister of Interior for the Liberal
Wilfrid Laurier government (1896-1905), persuaded both his col¬
leagues and the eastern economic barons that their future profits lay in
selling western railroad land cheaply to desperate eastern farmers and
European immigrants, thus populating the West and raising wheat for
sale on the international market. Sifton won out on both counts. He
got a cheap labor force for the West; by 1901, 8 percent of the national
population dwelt in the once sparse prairies. By 1931, that figure
had risen to 25 percent. With the end of the war in 1918, wheat had
become Canadas most important export, and the Prairies accounted
for 90 percent of that production. No wonder wheat became the
operative “gold standard” for Canada and received the honorific title
of “King Wheat.”3
This mix of immigration and the rise of railway centers caused an
urban boom as well, an expansion underscored by a “self-made man”
reflected in the city boosterism. Winnipeg, located in the middle of the
nation, became the railway hub of the new Canada. In 1891, the city
contained a mere 26,000 people, but by 1916 the number had risen to
163,000, composing approximately one-third of Manitoba’s popula¬
tion. As well, this “Chicago of the North” employed 57.3 percent of
330 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

the Prairie labor force and produced 48.2 percent of the gross value of
Prairie manufacturing output. A set of Anglo-Saxon Protestant entre¬
preneurs came to dominate the political, social, and economic life of
the city, and it was they who orchestrated the booster public relations
crusade that used the major newspapers to lure further investment
into this booming railway center. A combination of arrogance and
imperial vision, so common to the successful practitioners of the
Protestant work ethic, generated civic leaflets and advertisements, as
the following quotation demonstrates so clearly: “The doors of vast
opportunity lay wide open and Canadas adventurous sons flocked
to Winnipeg to have a part in the great expansion—the building of a
new and greater Canadian West. They were big men, come together
with big purpose. Their ideas were big, and they fought for the real¬
ization of them.”4 Typical and notable among them was James Henry
Ashdown, the “Merchant Prince.” While making his millions in the
hardware industry and real estate speculation, he figured prominently
in the city’s powerful business organizations, served a term as mayor,
directed a city bank, and emerged as the single most powerful influ¬
ence in the city’s Methodist Church institutions, including Wesley
College (Prairie Methodism’s key seminary).
In spite of the programmatic hype spun by Ashdown and his elite
colleagues, the city had its bleak and darker side. Into the northern
sector of the city, called alternately “CPR Town” or
the “Foreign Quarter,” squeezed the hated immi¬
The Social Gospel in Canada grants and workers who performed hard labor
The Social Gospel was progressive, in the city’s railroad yards. Shocking conditions
optimistic, and driven by a crusad¬ of human misery dominated the grim streets
ing zeal; it was strongest within the of this makeshift ghetto. The Reverend James
Protestant churches that were stron¬
Shaver Woodsworth, one of the social gospel’s
gest on the prairies; it provided the
most prominent leaders and an early settlement
support of the churches and the gos¬
house worker in this neighborhood, was appalled
pel—crucial elements in that age—
by what he saw. “Let me tell you of one little for¬
for campaigns of social reform and
eign girl,” he penned in a piece he wrote for the
regeneration.
—Gerald Friesen, The Canadian
Manitoba Free Press (March 12, 1909). “She lives
Prairies (Toronto: University of in a room in a disreputable old tenement—one of
Toronto Press, 1984), 351. those human warrens which are multiplying with
great rapidity in our city. Her father has no work.
 Canadian Workers and Social Justice | Cole-Arnal 331

The men boarders have no work. The place is incredibly filthy. The little
girl has been ill for months—all that time living on the bed in which
three or four persons must sleep and which also serves the purpose of
table and chairs.” By this time, the charity-dispensing social gospeler
had begun to ask the dangerous question, “Why?” In the same article,
he added: “Yes, and many of the well-to-do are drawing large revenues
from this same misery.... The owners of some of our vilest dens in
the city were our ‘best’ (!) people—our society people, our church
people, and that for these houses they obtain in some cases, double
the legitimate rentals.”5 In the midst of social misery some adherents
of the social gospel began to raise painful issues.

Birth and Expansion

(1890s to March 1914)

The social gospel emerged in Canada as part of an international

movement of English-speaking Protestants caught up in the liberal
optimism of westward expansion and the imperialistic notion of
British or American superiority. Along with its antiforeign and rac¬
ist overtones one found also a broad push for social reform directed
toward those who suffered the fallout of such expansionist projects,
namely small farmers and workers in the cities. To a person, the public
advocates of the early Canadian social gospel were white Anglo-Saxon
Protestants, mostly from the Methodist, Presbyterian, and Anglican
denominations. Though highly influential by the outbreak of World
War I in August 1914, the social gospelers were only a vocal minor¬
ity within their denominations; their optimism was characterized
by expansionist dreams of nation building and the frontier missions
that would make this possible. Indeed, Woodsworth’s father was
Methodism’s chief mission official for the Prairie provinces. As the
Prairies urbanized in the wake of railway expansion, the three major
Protestant denominations replaced an earlier Catholic dominance.
With the exception of marginalized immigrant sectors from Central
and Eastern Europe, these social gospel churches dominated the Prai¬
rie urban scene and most of the grain-farming communities as well.
In this overall ecclesiastical context the emerging social gospel found a
rather warm welcome within such expansionist dreams. An apparent
332 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

unity held among social gospelers until Canada was plunged into the
European war.
Even so, three tendencies developed gradually Social gospel his¬
torian Richard Allen, in his book The Social Passion, describes these
as (1) conservative, (2) progressive, and (3) radical. By definition the
conservatives represented a largely charitable model supporting the
alleviation of social pain as a vital step in the evangelizing process,
whereas progressives sought significant social reform largely through
official church statements as appeal mechanisms for legislative reform
in social and economic matters. The small group of radicals, who
emerged as a distinct voice in the latter war years and especially
during the Winnipeg General
Strike in 1919, promoted a
vision, which today would be
called democratic socialism,
and joined aggressive grass¬
roots movements to give birth
to their dreams. In the midst
of conflict this handful of radi¬
cal Protestants was forced to
find allies outside of their reject¬
ing denominations. Until the
1920s, the progressives seemed
to hold the field, especially in
the Presbyterian and Methodist
churches.
Fig. 14.2. A crowd during Building on successful alliances in temperance and “Lord’s Day”
the Winnipeg Strike of 1919
outside the Union Bank (six-day work week) campaigns with Canadas moderate English-
Building on Main Street. speaking trade union movement, the Methodists and Presbyterians set
Photo courtesy Library and
Archives Canada. up official departments charged directly with social gospel concerns
under the able leadership of the moderate progressives T. A. Moore
and J. G. Shearer respectively Building upon these early achievements
they and others (especially the labor movement) formed the Moral
and Social Reform Council (later called the Social Service Council)
both to collect vital information in support of social change projects
and to lobby governments to promote and produce such measures.
Gains in this direction had been accomplished already through the
 Canadian Workers and Social Justice I Cole-Arnal 333

Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) under the Canadian

leadership of such social gospelers as Sara Rowell Wright and Letitia
Youmans. Following the example of its American leader, Frances Wil¬
lard, the Canadian WCTU moved beyond halting the booze trade into
the realm of settlement houses, urban reform, fair labor legislation,
Christian socialism, and female suffrage.
As in the United States the WCTU served as a training ground
to launch Protestant women into public life. Chief among them was
Methodist writer and suffrage activist Nellie McClung, whose long
career demonstrates how wide-ranging social gospel issues came to
permeate Canadian society. McClung reached
the broader public chiefly as a popular writer and
The Motherhood of God
speaker, but she engaged also in direct political
The Church has been dominated by
activism, ran for office in the Liberal Party, served
men and so religion has been given a
as a Canadian delegate to the League of Nations masculine interpretation, and I believe
and became in her elder years the first woman the Protestant religion has lost much
on the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s board when it lost the idea of the mother¬
of directors. The activist McClung claimed that hood of God.
“the meaning of the women’s movement” was to —Nellie McClung,
“sit down and be resigned” no longer but rather In Times Like These
“to rise up and be indignant.” She and a band of (New York: Appleton, 1915), 70.

women managed to do just that when they held

a mock parliament of women at Winnipeg’s Walker Theater in 1914,
which dramatized the silliness of the Manitoba parliament’s denial of
the vote to women.
The grand success of these assorted groups of Protestant reform¬
ers climaxed on March 3-5, 1914, at the Social Service Congress in
Ottawa. Over two hundred delegates gathered there from a wide range
of social professions, all dedicated in one way or another to economic
and humanitarian reform. Called a “free parliament on social ques¬
tions,” this congress consisted of a “Who’s Who” of prominent social
gospel leaders in Canada with a sprinkling of American counterparts.
A full 50 percent of the presenters at Congress sessions were clergy,
mostly coming from the social gospel churches. Although rural issues
were voiced, the center of gravity focused on urban concerns such as
child welfare, temperance, prison reform, labor unrest, and the role of
religion in building the new society. So notable was this conference
334 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

that Prime Minister Robert Borden and Liberal opposition leader

Wilfrid Laurier shared a head table at the opening session. Optimism
abounded; a glorious future was at hand. The united social gospel had
reached its noontide.6

Conflict and Division

War and labor strife intervened to shatter such dreams. Given the
links of social gospel hopes with Anglo-Saxon imperialism, most
vocal Presbyterians and Methodists, along with their leadership,
viewed the war effort against the German “Huns” as a continuation
of social gospel progress. Although the Presbyterian Commission
on the War (1917) warned the church and Canadian society that the
tyranny of Germany found its parallel in Canadian injustice, almost
all social gospel figures called for support in fighting “Gods war.”
However, two dissidents in Winnipeg among the
Methodist clergy proved to be portents of radical
activism to come. Woodsworth, the coordina¬
A Hymn for the People
tor of the new Bureau of Social Research for the
We knelt before kings, we bent three Prairie provinces, proclaimed a passionate
before lords; pacifism. Given the fact that this new social work
For theirs were the crowns, and agency, which had emerged from the March 1914
theirs were the swords; Congress and government funding, stood behind
But the times of the bending and the war effort, Woodsworth was pressured into
bowing are past, resigning. Meanwhile a Winnipeg pastor, William
And the day of the people is dawning Ivens of McDougall Methodist Church, faced
at last! a congregation polarized by his stand against
the war. Already treading on thin ice with his
—a hymn by the Reverend William
open labor activism in the community, Ivens had
Ivens (first labor church pastor)
crossed a point of no return when he used his pul¬
in Dennis L. Butcher, Catherine
pit to cry out against the war. His refusal to back
Macdonald, and Margaret E.
the party line led to several petition campaigns
McPherson, eds., Prairie Spirit:
Perspectives on the Heritage of the within both church and community to keep him
United Church of Canada in the West at his post against a growing opposition. How¬
(Winnipeg: University of Manitoba ever, divisions within the congregation proved
Press, 1985), 239. too strong and key Methodist elites too powerful
to allow him to remain as pastor. The provincial
 Canadian Workers and Social Justice I Cole-Arnal 335

Methodist Conference gave Ivens a way out. He was granted a year of

freedom from stationing at a parish in order to form a popular church
sympathetic to labor. This he did on June 30, 1918.7
In less than a year the city of Winnipeg had ground to a halt. What
began as a manageable labor dispute blossomed immediately into the
most famous general strike in Canadian history. From mid-May to
June 25, 1919, approximately 35,000 workers in a total city population
of 175,000 were out on strike. The Central Strike Committee (with fif¬
teen members) coordinated the running of the community, providing
both essential and emergency services. Throughout this brief period
the entire nation watched anxiously. Socialist and new more radical
labor movements climbed on board, while the local Winnipeg elite
enlisted the powerful support of governments, army, and Royal North¬
west Mounted Police (the Mounties). In Winnipeg itself local police
and sectors of returning veterans supported the strike. Ivens’s church
found itself at the heart of the work stoppage. Religious services and
union rallies blended together effortlessly, and at times Ivens preached
his pro-strike sermons to enthusiastic open-air audiences of up to five
thousand supporters. The activist pastor wrote radical pro-labor, social
gospel hymns for his church and movement, and he edited the strike
newspaper the Western Labor News during its brief existence.
Meanwhile other social gospel clergy joined this wave of strike
enthusiasm. In neighboring Brandon, Manitoba, the prominent
Methodist minister A. E. Smith left his divided congregation to create
a Peoples (Labor) Church patterned after the Winnipeg example. He
was assisted ably by Beatrice Brigden, an employee of the Methodist
Church’s Department of Evangelism and Social Service (DESS). After
Smith’s departure into electoral politics shortly after the strike, Brig¬
den took over the leadership of the Brandon Church. She began as an
itinerant teacher at Methodist churches across the land; her mandate
involved the training of girls to become appropriate young ladies.
But from the beginning Brigden moved beyond this expectation. In
preparation she decided to do a stint at Jane Addams’s Hull House
in Chicago and undertake factory work in Toronto both to meet
her economic needs and to understand firsthand the unjust treat¬
ment of women workers. Her long-term ties to Woodsworth and her
increasing work partnership with Smith helped distance her further
336 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

from the conservative influence of her direct employer, DESS head

T. A. Moore.
William Irvine of Calgary supported the strike through his popu¬
list organization, the Alberta Non-Partisan League, and his own news¬
paper, the Nutcracker. In the meantime, Woodsworth had antagonized
his parish at Gibsons Landing, British Columbia, over issues of war
and working-class justice, and he had received no support from that
province’s Methodist Conference in these struggles. At this point,
he resigned from the ministry, and in order to support his family he
undertook dock labor and became a union activist and committed
member of his province’s Federated Labor Party. Upon hearing of
the Winnipeg strike he returned to support this labor activism on his
home turf.8
These radical individuals, inspired by their visions of a social gos¬
pel new day, felt compelled to join farm and radical labor conflicts and
thereby uphold the impending new order of God they saw emerging
out of such struggles. Their “progressive” comrades, who dominated
the ecclesiastical institutions, were frightened and scandalized by
such behavior. Content instead to pass high-
sounding statements calling for reform, peaking
On the Labor Church
in the detailed social policy paper adopted by
The movement [of the Labor Church]
the Methodist General Conference in the fall of
is a protest against the present social
1918, they hoped that idealism alone would guide
order.... Its aims are social, notmerely
owners and workers together to build God’s reign
individualistic, that means it stands for
replacing the present selfish scramble
in the midst of social peace. Whether by cyni¬
for existence by a co-operative com¬ cal calculation, naivete, or a blend of both, they
monwealth in which each will have a washed their hands of their more radical brothers
chance. and sisters, who had endorsed and participated in
—J. S. Woodsworth, First Story the Winnipeg general strike. This fear escalated
(1920), 114; reprinted in Consensus: especially when both Ivens and Woodsworth were
A Canadian Lutheran Journal of arrested and jailed as strike leaders. So terrified
Theology 19, no. 2(1993). was Methodism’s social gospel bureaucracy that
Moore agreed to provide information on the labor
churches secretly to the Mounties. Even earlier, in calmer days, signs
of a growing division became apparent when the activist church histo¬
rian at Wesley College, the Reverend Salem Bland, was dropped from
the faculty. In spite of appeals from Bland himself and social gospelers
 Canadian Workers and Social Justice I Cole-Arnal 337

in both farm and labor, the “progressive” Method¬

ist establishment turned its back on the popular The Beginnings of Canadian Socialism
professor in order not to offend the colleges board Whether or not the commercial elite
chair, James Henry Ashdown. It was a sign of of Winnipeg would be overthrown,
things to come.9 they had at least met their match [in
With the sidelining of social gospel radicals the Reverend Salem Bland], and an

from their churches and with the collapse of the alternative Protestant ethic in Canada

general strike, these activists turned to politics. was well on its way to becoming the
spirit of Canadian socialism.
Initially candidates for independent farm or labor
—Richard Allen, "Salem Bland
parties, a handful of them won seats in both fed¬
and the Spirituality of the Social
eral and provincial legislatures. After some suc¬
Gospel," in Dennis L. Butcher,
cesses most farm coalitions were compromised
Catherine Macdonald, and Margaret
by the old-line Liberals in Ottawa. Only a tiny few
E. McPherson, eds., Prairie Spirit:
remained as radical voices in the federal parlia¬
Perspectives on the Heritage of the
ment, where they were called the “Ginger Group.” United Church of Canada in the West
Consisting of such figures as the social gospel vet¬ (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba
erans Woodsworth and Irvine, they were joined Press, 1985), 232.
in 1921 by United Farmers of Ontario advocate
and social gospeler Agnes Campbell MacPhail, the first woman
elected to Canada’s federal parliament. The crowning success of this
handful of feisty voices came together at Regina, Saskatchewan, in
1933, when, in the midst of the Depression, farm and labor militants
from across the country created Canada’s enduring social democratic
party, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). The CCF
and its successor, the New Democratic Party, remain, along with
the profession of social work and the justice advocacy of the United
Church of Canada, the most enduring concrete legacies of Canada’s
social gospel/0

QUEBEC'S SOCIAL CATHOLICISM

Setting the Stage

In 1848, all Europe was aflame with revolt. From the western bor¬
ders of the Russian Empire to the French Atlantic coast, democratic
and nationalist radicals marched and fought to overthrow the old
338 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

monarchical orders on the continent. In Italy Giuseppe Garibaldi

led his Red Shirts into Rome, there to hurl out papal rule and install
a Roman republic reflecting the dreams of his mentor Giuseppe
Mazzini. But 1848 also gave way to counterrevolutionary actions,
including the restoration of Rome to the papacy by the French troops
of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. Meanwhile a frightened papacy under
Pius IX (1846-1878) retreated behind a wall of medieval dreams that
repudiated those democratic ideas born of the Enlightenment and
the French and Industrial Revolutions. His successor, the aristocratic
Leo XIII, shared his predecessor’s fear of modernity, but the new pope
adopted strategies to move beyond reaction toward positive solutions.
In this context “the social doctrine of the church” (social Catholicism)
came to birth in Leo’s trail-blazing encyclical Rerum novarum (1891).
In it the pope railed against the evils of modern industrialization
and the socialist firebrands he believed were its diabolical children.
Across Western Europe and in North America Catholics responded
in various creative ways to their leader’s manifesto. Catholic Quebec
proved to be no exception.

Forerunners

Of course, Catholicism’s concern for the marginalized did not begin

in 1891. In Quebec such a commitment emerged as early as New
France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Here women,
both laity and nuns, created unilaterally an entire system of health,
education, and welfare often over against male leadership, both
clerical and lay. Catholic France had experienced a wave of activist
spirituality in the seventeenth century that swept through a number
of religious orders while creating others. Given that Europe’s Catholic
Reformation had forced nuns to live behind cloistered walls, vision¬
ary sisters found public ministries increasingly difficult to perform.
France’s Quebec colony provided an opportunity for these women
to exercise creativity through direct action in ways impossible on
the Continent. Indeed, in the colonies of Quebec City and Montreal,
male leadership concentrated on exploiting the Native population
and engaging in sweeping travels in search of the profit maximization
promised by the sale of beaver pelts. Consequently both these towns
 Canadian Workers and Social Justice I Cole-Arnal 339

of New France focused upon military protection in service of the fur

trade. To be sure, there were timid efforts to provide enduring struc¬
tures to ensure the sustainability necessary for permanent colonies,
but these proved short-lived. Only the religious orders seemed intent
upon providing the care necessary both to form covenants with the
Natives already on the land and to create systems of education, health
care, and social assistance.
After losing her husband, the young widow Marie Guyart, later
known as Marie de l’lncarnation, struggled through poverty to raise
a young son, all the while feeling called to the
religious life. Eventually she entered the revived
Ursuline order with the clear notion that God The Origins of New France
The religious dream was far more
wanted her to serve in the colony of New France.
powerful than that of the state in
Against much naysaying by male clerical lead¬
the early seventeenth century. Indeed
ers she found a patron in Madame de la Peltrie.
without it there might have been no
Together these women raised the necessary funds
New France at all.
to send Marie to Quebec City. There she engi¬
—Susan Mann Trofimenkoff,
neered the construction of a convent house and The Dream of Nation:
school through fund-raising and administrative A Social and Intellectual
skills. Her attention focused on the education of History of Quebec
aboriginal women in Quebec City and environs. (Toronto: Gage, 1983), 3.
Although colored by racist superiority and impe¬
rial notions of a civilizing mission, Marie gave her
life unsparingly to her Native charges. She learned their languages,
taught them to read in their own tongues, defended them against the
extremes of colonial oppression, and left a legacy of numerous spiri¬
tual writings.
In Montreal, then called Ville Marie, a number of women created
an entire system of human care from scratch. Jeanne Mance was the
traveling patron of this work. She studied medicine in order to create
a hospital in the colony as well as enable her to make several trips to
and from France to raise money for the colony’s hospital system. Join¬
ing her in the work of providing schools and housing was Margue¬
rite Bourgeoys, a laywoman who formed a community of women to
serve human need at Ville Marie. Women were especially vulnerable
in the new colony; they experienced poverty and abandonment and
found themselves often forced into prostitution, which led to a large
340 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

population of abandoned orphans. Into the breach

Living in Solidarity with the Poor: stepped Marguerite d’Youville and her streetwise
Marguerite Bourgeoys Grey Sisters, who provided refuge and safety for
Ourfood, our dress, and all the neces¬ these most vulnerable women. Such accomplish¬
sities of life ought to appear poor ments of schools, hospitals, and social assistance,
and simple because [with the Blessed
almost exclusively by women, stood against the
Virgin] food, drink, clothing and all the
backdrop of male scorn and opposition not least
other necessities were always poor.
of all coming from such high-ranking clergy as
—Marguerite Bourgeoys,
Francois de Laval, the powerful bishop of Que¬
"Document 17: Reaffirmation of
bec City. Thus did the reality of New France lay
the Spirit of Poverty," in Rosemary
Radford Ruether and Rosemary
the groundwork for subsequent Quebec Catholic
Skinner Keller, eds., Women and history—namely the prominent role of women
Religion in America, vol. 2 (San meeting immediate grassroots needs and the pow¬
Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983), 117. erful male authority structure that dominated the
church and society in which they operated.11

Clerico-Nationalism

Quebec’s status as a thoroughly Catholicized French enclave in North

America, combined with its economic tutelage to Anglo-Canadian
finance and increasingly American industrial corporations, gave this
Canadian province its own unique brand of colonialism. Such an
arrangement grew out of the final peace between England and France
after the Seven Years War (1756-1763). Because of Britain’s continual
struggles with France elsewhere and with its colonies to the south,
England proposed a deal that permitted the French Catholic culture
its autonomy within the larger British Empire. In order for such an
arrangement to function, the French-speaking church under its bish¬
ops supplied the necessary leadership. So began the powerful inde¬
pendence of Quebec Catholicism, which came to define this sector of
Canada so deeply throughout its history.
By the latter nineteenth century, agricultural Quebec was experi¬
encing a population boom. Large families were the norm of rural and
pious Quebec, forcing an out migration, first to New England mines
and textile factories and then to Quebec cities, especially Montreal,
where industrial expansion took advantage of the cheap labor supply
pouring into the urban ghettos. This shift from New England back to
 Canadian Workers and Social Justice | Cole-Arnal 341

Quebec began in earnest at the same time as the emergence of Rerum

novarum. By the early twentieth century Quebec Catholic elites began
to address the social question and bring it into line with the provinces
French-speaking nationalism. Two male leaders dominated this dis¬
course, and both adopted pro-grassroots tactics upheld by an elitist
agenda. Henri Bourassa made his mark by way of journalism and
public office. As editor and founder of the daily Le Devoir Bourassa
trumpeted his vision of Quebec as a Catholic missionary enclave in
North America with the God-given mandate of bringing Catholicism,
civilization, morality, and social justice to an Anglo-American society
characterized by sexual excesses, feminism, secularism, Marxism, and
other evils of modern society. Only the paternalism offered by Rerum
novarum could undermine these barbaric onslaughts on the North
American scene.
Father Lionel Groulx offered a more defensive version of the
same message. Even more conservative than the optimistic Bourassa,
Groulx offered up a dose of survivalism (survivance). In his novels
and his newspapers and through his fascist-like organization, Action
Fran<;aise, Groulx rallied his troops against perceived invasions of
Anglo-modernism into Quebec. He pleaded desperately against
Anglo business, foreigners, Jews, independent women, socialists, and
nonconfessional unions and called for a purely French and Catholic
Quebec along mythical lines of a rural piety that never existed except
in the minds of its desperate creators. In spite of some clashes with
the bishops, largely due to papal changes in Europe, Catholic leaders
like Bourassa, Groulx, and others became leading public voices for
a system in Quebec that gave its French-speaking Catholic Church
control over the social fabric of the province, thus providing the kind
of social peace and cheap labor that Anglo-American industrialists
found so appealing about Quebec. This socioeconomic situation fed
the ambitions of one of the province’s most successful politicians,
Maurice Duplessis, who served as its premier from 1936 to 1940 and
then without interruption from 1944 until his death in 1959.12
During this period of harsh economic realities and political repres¬
sion a tiny grassroots social Catholicism came to fruition and proved
to be a forerunner of a modernized Quebec inaugurated by the “Quiet
Revolution” of 1960. Even before the Depression fell on Quebec, its
342 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

industrial workforce suffered under the weight of factory labor and

the mines. Not unaware of this and building upon the charitable forms
advocated by Rerum novarum, church leaders and social reformers
began to develop programs to mitigate such injustices. Beginning as
top-down efforts, both the passage of
time and grassroots membership came
to shift, reshape, and redefine the more
controlling structures that church fig¬
ures offered via their charitable motives.
Three approaches represented this evolv¬
ing social Catholicism in Quebec, which
moved from a top-down paternalism to
popular radicalism from the early 1900s
to the explosions growing out of the
Quiet Revolution in 1960 into the early
1980s: (1) social Catholic think tanks;
Fig. 14.3. Jeunesse Ouvriere (2) specialized Catholic Action in the form of the Jeunesse Ouvriere
Catholique Society, Septem- catholique (JOC; Young Catholic Workers); and (3) Catholic trade
ber 1940. Photo by Oscar n v' °
Chretien. Johns-Manville unionism.
Photo Collection: Societe
d'histoire d'Asbestos. Used
by permission. Social Catholic Think Tanks

Not surprisingly such think tanks arose from the educated elite in
Quebec and included those figures, lay and clergy, who felt a Catholic
responsibility to address and mitigate the ravages of the Industrial
Revolution in the name of Rerum novarum and its 1931 update by
Pius XI, Quadragesimo anno. A Jesuit team, led by Father Joseph-Papin
Archambault, came together with the purpose of taking the principles
of Rerum novarum and putting them into action. Archambault’s Ecole
Sociale Populaire (Popular Social School), created in 1911, gathered
the leading lay and clergy elites of Quebec’s social Catholicism and put
them to work creating ideological and practical blue pamphlets that
addressed rural and industrial challenges facing the province. These
studies sought to inspire projects of social justice under the auspices of
the church. Patterned after the continental French Jesuit effort Action
Populaire, Archambault borrowed another French model to set up the
more broadly based think tank Semaines Sociales du Canada (Cana¬
dian Social Weeks), established in June 1920.
 Canadian Workers and Social Justice I Cole-Arnal 343

For the next four decades once-a-year week-long sessions were

held around social justice themes and convened leading Catholic
activists, including bishops, priests, nuns, Catholic journalists, Catho¬
lic trade union leaders, and even the feminist Catholic organizer
Marie-Lacoste Gerin-Lajoie. But even Gerin-Lajoie’s progressive cre¬
dentials did not change the overall antimodern, antileftist character
of Archambault’s efforts. Tightly connected to Quebec’s bishops, both
the pamphlets and the Semaines mirrored social policies paralleled
by Mussolini’s fascist state and its theological dressing in Pius XI’s
social encyclical Quadregisimo anno (1931). Nonetheless, the socially
minded Jesuits laid the groundwork upon which others built more
progressive models from the latter 1930s into the 1980s.
From the late 1930s through the dark years of the Duplessis regime
and up to the outburst of the Quiet Revolution, new leaders emerged
who sought to motivate grassroots Quebecers committed to social
change, modernization, and social democracy. The Dominican father
Georges-Flenri Levesque became the patron of these, being respon¬
sible for undermining clergy and top-down models through building
nonconfessional cooperatives, training union leaders and militants
in study and mobilization tactics, and creating a modern school of
sociology at the Universite Laval on the outskirts of Quebec City.
Levesque influenced an entire generation of journalists, intellectuals,
and union leaders, who formed the vanguard of Catholic resistance to
Duplessis’s corrupt and authoritarian police state. Andre Laurandeau
used his newspaper, Le Devoir, to challenge the old ways, and a cadre
of young intellectuals (notably Pierre Trudeau, Gerard Pelletier, and
Pierre Vadeboncoeur) published a small periodical Cite Libre, which
rallied anti-Duplessis forces and inspired alliances with other progres¬
sive movements, notably labor. Jean Marchand, one of Catholic labor’s
firebrands, also felt the guiding hand of Father Levesque.
After about a decade of this Quiet Revolution, when largely Lib¬
eral governments declericalized and modernized Quebec, the think
tank model took on a grassroots character among increasing numbers
of Catholic laity and progressive priests on the political and social
left. In 1970, a Fils de Charite priest, Claude Lefebvre, formed the
Centre de Pastorale en Milieu Ouvrier (CPMO; Pastoral Center in
a Working-Class Setting) to train priests for work in popular neigh¬
borhoods where marginalized workers lived and struggled. Lefebvre
344 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

insisted on a participatory model in which priests lived in the work¬

ing ghettos, adopting fully the life conditions they encountered. They
were expected to learn from workers rather than teach. Quickly this
model led to teams (equipes) of priestly activists joining in grassroots
movements for neighborhood and factory justice. The next two direc¬
tors, Raymond Levac and Jean-Guy Cassebon, left the priesthood to
assume a lay vocation, and both led the CPMO to help form alliances
of study and action with labor and other dissident leftist coalitions.
Building on Latin American liberation theology and its practice,
the CPMO used Marxist social analysis to establish popular neigh¬
borhood church groups (eglises populaires), which practiced gender
and class equality as matters of principle. Other Catholic think tanks
followed suit, notably the Quebec City Carrefour de Pastorale en
Monde Ouvrier (Pastoral Crossroad in the Working-Class World)
(CAPMO), which used a citizen-oriented town hall model to build a
neighborhood CPMO. Easily the most radical of all the think tanks
was the ecumenical Politises Chretiens (Politicized Christians), which
adopted a conscious Marxist-Christian analytical model in support of
an egalitarian social revolution in Quebec. A high point of such think
tank efforts was the Cap Rouge Conference in 1974, where all ele¬
ments advocating a grassroots church met to consolidate their efforts.
Sadly their visions engendered fear among the bishops, who sought to
isolate Catholic socialist radicals from the more moderate progressive
groups at the conference.13

Specialized Catholic Action

Other more popularly based groups embracing social Catholicism

emerged in interwar Quebec as well. Of these the most notable was
the specialized Catholic Action model, initially formed among work¬
ing-class adolescents in Belgium (1925) and called the Young Christian
Workers (Jeunesse Ouvriere Chretienne). Once again French-speaking
Europe provided the model, this time for Quebec’s Jeunesse Ouvriere
Catholique (JOC). At the same time, the Canadian Oblate priest Henri
Roy brought his own inspiration and creativity to the Quebec move¬
ment. Though envisioned as a mass movement of Catholic working-
class youth led by its chaplain priests as direct representatives of the
 Canadian Workers and Social Justice | Cole-Arnal 345

bishops, the very nature of its working-class base eroded over time
this direct control by the priests. Quebec’s first official JOC local in
Montreal (1931) actually consisted of young women workers (Jeunesse
Ouvriere Catholique Feminine). Covering the age range from twelve
(when many entered factories) to roughly twenty-five years (unless
married), young Catholic workers organized local, sexually segregated
cells that banded together into an influential national unit with a peak
membership of around forty-two thousand during World War II. For
the clergy, including the movements chaplains and especially the bish¬
ops, the JOC/JOCF was their answer to the moral and physical dangers
of urban and factory life, which threatened to lure youth away from
good Catholic practice. Church officialdom shuddered especially at
the notion of women working and living any sort of autonomous life
in what the clergy felt to be a sexually charged atmosphere.
Yet even from the 1930s and well into the 1940s, when the church
sustained much control over its working-class members, the reality
of poverty, factory labor, and struggle shaped youth profoundly. By
creating a movement strictly among young industrial workers the
church enabled these adolescents to exercise their skills as researchers,
organizers, writers, public speakers, lobbyists, and activists. Holding
their own study circles, organizing neighborhood programs for social
change, joining unions, and publishing their own newspapers gen¬
erated their own brand of independence in which grassroots youth
learned to express their faith beyond the control of the church’s reli¬
gious professionals. Though initially conservative in outlook, these
youth witnessed and acted in the midst of their gritty lives without the
presence even of those chaplains they most loved and respected. With
the arrival of the Quiet Revolution both the JOC and the JOCF, along
with their adult counterparts, had begun pressing for more radical
changes involving global issues, gender equality, and support of more
aggressive union militancy. By the latter 1970s they had adopted ele¬
ments of liberation theology in both theory and practice.14

Catholic Trade Unions (1921—1980s)

The union movement had entered Quebec well before Catholic trade
unionism’s appearance. Indeed, Catholic labor organizations emerged
346 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

as a reaction against more militant, class-oriented, nonsectarian

movements that came from the American Knights of Labor followed
by the American Federation of Labor. Building upon the visions of
Rerum novarum a number of compassionate priests gathered together
different Catholic unions in Hull (1921) and brought to birth the Con¬
federation des Travailleurs Catholiques du Canada (CTCC; Canadian
Catholic Federation of Labor). So conservative was this effort that
non-Catholic members had no voting rights; class cooperation and
social peace were advocated against the Anglo-American unions; and
initially the bishop-appointed chaplain held a veto over all union deci¬
sions. Without the bishop’s word something as devastating as a strike
would not be tolerated. This conservative reality was reflected clearly
during the CTCC presidency of Alfred Charpentier (1888-1982) who
led his union along cautious traditional social Catholic lines from
1935 to 1946.
Along the same lines as the JOC/JOCF the CTCC proved unable
to remain a bastion of clergy control in the midst of the working class.
The very reality of harsh working conditions and cheap labor costs
alienated Catholic toilers sharply against a rapacious owner class, both
Quebecer and American, so much so that the church’s authoritar¬
ian, class-collaborationist model faced rejection in the midst of such
inhumane conditions. A series of strikes—from the conflict of women
match workers in Hull (1924) through the shoemakers’ walkout (1926)
to the especially brutal Sorel shipbuilders strike (1937), where laborers
on the picket lines fought police, owners, and the first Duplessis gov¬
ernment—hardened the CTCC against official church solutions and
mediations that served the corporations more than worker needs.
Radical change came only in the aftermath of World War II.
An internal movement toward union democracy saw the beginning
of women’s inclusion in the leadership ranks of the federation, and
Charpentier was turfed out in favor of reformers who repudiated
the older, more top-down social Catholic model. With the advent of
Gerard Picard as federation president and more militant leaders like
Jean Marchand, Michel Chartrand, Yolande Valois, and Madeleine
Brosseau, the new CTCC moved beyond internal reform by opening
a working dialogue with other union federations and by forging alli¬
ances with other Catholic activists fighting the anti-union Duplessis
regime. The fact that most of the bishops favored the government
 Canadian Workers and Social Justice | Cole-Arnal 347

alienated the union even further from church

officialdom. The test of fire came in the famous Workers on Strike
Asbestos Strike of 1949. In the mining towns We will not hesitate for an instant
of Quebec’s eastern townships CTCC militants to launch a general strike through¬
walked off their jobs at the asbestos mines in pro¬ out the C.T.C.C. [Catholic trade union

test against both management’s hard line and the federation] if provincial authority will
not regulate matters in an equitable
notorious anti-union Bill 5 passed by the Duples-
manner very soon in this ten-month
sis government. Backed by a coalition of other
strike at Louiseville. If Quebec does
unions, anti-Duplessis political voices, their own
not act, the workers should defend
grassroots chaplains, and a handful of key bish¬
themselves alone.
ops, the CTCC strikers stood up to management
—Gerard Picard, "Si Quebec n'agit
thugs; an establishment press (save for Le Devoir); pas," Le Travail, January 2,1953,1;
a Duplessis-inspired, anti-union, provincial police translation by the author.
force; and powerful conservative Catholics.
The union’s show of solidarity against such odds won over more
and more sectors of the church, even to the point of gaining the sym¬
pathetic help of the powerful Montreal archbishop Joseph Charbon-
neau. Although Charbonneau was removed from his post (likely as a
result of pressure on the church from Premier Duplessis), Quebec’s
bishops moved slowly in support of the strikers’ claim and arbitrated
the dispute. Although immediate gains for asbestos workers were
slight, this strike marked a turning point for the CTCC. From that
point until the union dropped its Catholic restrictions by the Quiet
Revolution of 1960, the Catholic federation provided Quebec’s most
significant mass force against the province’s repressive government
and served as a rallying hope for Catholic progressives. It pushed for
a unity of trade unions in Quebec, led a number of other militant
strikes, and stirred anti-Duplessis forces through the dark years of the
1950s. By the time it became the Confederation des Syndicats Nation-
aux (CSN; Confederation of National Unions), with emphasis on its
French-speaking “national” (Quebec) identity, the federation had
moved clearly into a democratic socialist model, which it advocated
for the new post-Duplessis Quebec.15

Grassroots Social Catholicism in the New Quebec

In his book The Church in Quebec theologian and sociologist Gregory

Baum provides a model of how a very conservative, highly clericalized
348 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

Catholic Church came to adapt itself without harsh opposition to the

newly emerging Quiet Revolution with its secularization and modern¬
ization. Beyond the growing influence of Catholic progressives during
the Duplessis years, the Quiet Revolution coincided directly with the
liberalization of global Catholicism inspired by Pope John XXIII and
the Second Vatican Council. The spirit of Vatican II gave Quebec
Catholic progressives the opportunity to launch creative ventures
that paralleled both earlier developments in France and the emer¬
gence of Latin American liberation theology. Newer, more popularly
based think tanks like the CPMO became the norm, and specialized
working-class Catholic Action (both youth and adult members) pur¬
sued more radical and more independent paths toward its growing
vision of gender and class equality. The lifelong leadership of Catholic
leftist Denyse Gauthier, both provincially and internationally, exem¬
plified such changes.
In the working-class neighborhoods priests and nuns formed
small Christian groups that met for worship, reflection, and just
social change based on the Latin American model of base Christian
communities (comunidades eclesiais de base). These popular churches
(eglises populaires) broke with a traditional top-down model, adopting
instead the praxis-reflection-praxis model of team
sharing and decision making. The priests, nuns,
Living in Solidarity with the Poor: and lay brothers practiced what they preached by
Benoit Fortin living in the same harsh conditions as their neigh¬
We must be reborn from among the bors. Following an earlier French and Belgian
poor, near to their cries, in solidar¬ model, a number of them became worker-priests
ity with their struggles. Jesus has or worker-nuns by taking up factory labor and
embraced the human condition; he
thereby earning their own livelihood indepen¬
has taken the way of the stable. We
dent of church financial support. In a number of
will recognize nothing of human dis¬
instances they became union leaders, organizers,
tress if we do not live in solidarity
and factory militants. Sister Dolores Leger engaged
with the most oppressed through our
in union struggles out of the Granby textile plant,
own flesh.
—Benoit Fortin, worker-priest,
where she toiled from 1978 to 1982. After that she
"Quand se leve le soleil de justice," worked within the left wing of the separatist Parti
17, from private papers, Quebecois (PQ), where she struggled tirelessly for
translated by the author. social justice legislation and feminist causes. In
this respect Sister Leger embodied her religious
 Canadian Workers and Social Justice Cole-Arnal 349

order, the Soeurs Notre-Dame du Bon

Conseil (Sisters of Our Lady of Wis¬
dom), founded by Marie Gerin-Lajoie,
daughter of a famous Catholic suffragist
and feminist. Both Father Guy Cousin
and Capuchin Benoit Fortin organized
union locals against overwhelming odds,
bringing them into the CSN. Reflecting
upon a Franciscan notion of “spiritual¬
ity of the feet,” Fortin affirmed that a
worker-priesthood provided an example
of being “reborn from among the poor,
near to their cries” and “in solidarity
with their struggles.”16 Instead of the old model of church control Fig. 14.4. People eating
within the former CTCC, radical and socialist Catholic priests and qliebeeP] 93^ PhotoTouttesy
nuns worked within the newer union movement as part of the rank Library and Archives Canada,
and file.17
Even traditional church structures and leadership sought to adapt
to changing times. When lay, trained social workers marginalized nuns
from their former control of social assistance programs, those reli¬
gious orders with traditions of hands-on work among the poor (such
as Petites Soeurs de Jesus, or the Little Sisters of Jesus) sent nuns to live
in hard-pressed working ghettos to help communities organize them¬
selves to pursue just social change. The bishops themselves appointed
sociologist and lay Catholic Fernand Dumont to gather research and
present a report recommending new models for a church living in the
midst of crisis. Broadly based, including progressive Catholic activ¬
ists, Dumonts group held public hearings throughout the province
and published the results in 1971. A new church was called for, more
participatory internally and more committed to justice and equality
externally. Quebec experienced also its own radical diocese, that of
Gatineau-Hull, created in the wake of Vatican II. Its first two bishops
formed the new diocese on a Latin American liberationist model. The
second bishop, Adolphe Proulx, consulted regularly with his team of
community and trade-union activists, both clergy and lay. He sup¬
ported local protests for justice and gathered into coalition Quebec’s
most important local Catholic radicals.18
350 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

In spite of such creative experiments Quebec Catholicism was

stumbling by the early 1990s. Church attendance had plummeted
from 88 percent in 1960 to around 20 percent in just three decades.
The progressive Catholics were an aging phenomenon, and the prov¬
ince had become massively secularized, pushing its major church
establishment to the margins. Nonetheless, Quebec’s almost century-
long social Catholic evolution had laid the groundwork for making
the province the most socially progressive region in Canada.

FOR FURTHER READING

Allen, Richard. The Social Passion: Religion and Social Reform in Canada. Toronto: Uni¬
versity of Toronto Press, 1973.
Baum, Gregory. The Church in Quebec. Ottawa: Novalis, 1991.
Butcher, Dennis L„ Catherine Macdonald, and Margaret E. McPherson, eds. Prairie
Spirit: Perspectives on the Heritage of the United Church of Canada in the West.
Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1985.
Fay, Terence J. A History of Canadian Catholics. Montreal: McGill-Queens University
Press, 2002.
Gutkin, Harry, and Mildred Gutkin. Profiles in Dissent: The Shaping of Radical Thought
in the Canadian West. Edmonton: NeWest, 1997.
Linteau, Paul-Andre, Rene Durocher, Jean-Claude Robert, and Francois Ricard. Quebec
since 1930. Trans. Robert Chodos and Ellen Garmaise. Toronto: James Lorimer,
1991.
Stebner, Eleanor. “More Than Maternal Feminists and Good Samaritans: Women and
the Social Gospel in Canada.” In Wendy J. Deichmann Edwards and Carolyn De
Swarte Gifford, eds., Gender and the Social Gospel, 53-67. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2003.
Trofimenkoff, Susan Mann. The Dream of Nation: A Social and Intellectual History of
Quebec. Toronto: Gage, 1983.
POPULAR CATHOLIC
SEXUAL ETHICS

CRISTINA L. H.TRAINA
CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Do not endeavor to excuse [sexual thoughts] on any pretense whatever. Do

not say they are natural; do not think of such things on the idea that you
will marry by and by, but simply put them all out and keep them out. When
you have closed the door of your heart the enemy cannot find any entrance
for evil.
—From a Guide for Young Catholic Women, 18711

Creative abstinence is best understood as the conscious effort a couple makes

to enflame their desire for one another and enhance their intimacy by taking
short breaks (about a week or so) from genital intercourse while at the same
time intensifying the amount of nongenital physical contact. . . and other
expressions of affection.
On the tenth day while you were cuddling, you might tell each other all
the pleasures that you have in store for each other the following evening.
—From The Exceptional Seven Percent:
Nine Secrets of the World’s Happiest Couples, 20002

A t the turn of the twenty-first century as at the turn of the twen¬

tieth, Roman Catholic popular manuals on sex and marriage
agreed that genital sexuality was a power to be foregone outside mar¬
riage and to be employed with restraint within it.3 But this formal
similarity masks a sea change in American Catholic views of sex. At
the beginning of the period, the American Catholic popular press
bombarded its readers with incessant warnings against the dangers
of enjoying pesky but inevitable impure thoughts (let alone acting on
them) and urged Catholics to exercise constant vigilance against sexual
desire. A hundred years later, Catholic popular writings extolled the
pleasures of marital sex, recommending periodic abstinence not as a

351
352 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

way to quench desire but as a way to increase it, and even to encourage
exactly those fantasies that were so deeply feared a century earlier.
The story of this transformation includes the evolution of official
Roman Catholic teaching on sexuality, but it reflects just as strongly
ethnic Catholic assimilation and coming-of-age in American culture.
It is also an effect of Roman Catholics’ traditional approach to cultural
common wisdom, both scholarly and popular: because there is only
one truth, church teaching, cultural sexual “best practices” confirmed
by sociology, and biological-psychological discoveries about human
sexuality could not in the end be contradictory. However loudly and
forcefully American Roman Catholic guides on sex might resist some
elements of popular sexuality, they were destined to embrace still oth¬
ers with breathtaking enthusiasm. Here I will focus on three periods
with very distinctive characters: the minority, “fortress” writings of
the early twentieth century; the psychologically sophisticated postwar
literature produced before 1968; and the snappy self-help literature of
the late 1990s.

PURE THOUGHTS AND GUARDED EYES

Nowadays everybody “knows” that early and even mid-twentieth-
century popular Roman Catholicism was sexually repressed, and it
is implied that of course it must have been more repressed than the
surrounding culture. Leslie Woodcock Tentler’s Catholics and Con¬
traception gives the lie to this assumption. Early twentieth-century
Protestants do not in fact seem to have been significantly less anxious
about sex than Catholics or to have endorsed birth control or abortion
with any greater regularity. Protestants, like Catholics, participated
in a culture of abstinence and believed that the best way to contain
the growth of subversive sexual forces was to ignore them as much as
possible in public speaking and writing. Roman Catholics, like Prot¬
estants, probably continued in a combination of ignorance and defi¬
ance of Christian prohibitions of abortion and birth control, although
abortion may have dropped slightly in the early twentieth century.4
But if Roman Catholics’ anxiety over sex was roughly equal in
degree to Protestant anxiety, it had a distinctive quality. Most obvi-
 Popular Catholic Sexual Ethics Traina 353

ously, Tentler notes, Roman Catholics heard clerical tirades against

abortion and family limitation and were taught that sex’s only moral
redemption lay in procreation and payment of the “marital debt,” a
euphemism for providing a licit outlet for one’s spouse’s sexual desire,
which might otherwise find relief in affairs or masturbation.5 This
skepticism was magnified by a tradition nearly unknown to Protes¬
tants: the self-conscious culture of celibacy, obedience, and self-denial
for priests and for the women religious who constituted the corps of
parochial school teachers. These celibate men and women were also
the authoritative interpreters of the Catholic moral sexual tradition.
In addition, in 1900 most American Roman Catholics were in
some sense part of a subculture: in American culture but not of it.
The Roman Catholic Church in the Unites States was still officially a
mission church, despite its longevity on both the West and the East
coasts. More highly educated and assimilated Roman Catholics were
integrated into the culture economically, but they were acutely aware
of Rome’s skepticism about intellectual freedom, democracy, and
association with members of other religious communities, and they
feared running afoul of American antipapist anxiety. Among recent
immigrants, illiteracy, language barriers between laity and clergy, and
the clergy’s penchant for allusions and euphemisms made it unlikely
that many immigrants had a clear understanding of church teaching.
And immigrants were mostly concerned with survival, not sex. They
were often isolated physically from native-born Americans—whether
in New York ghettos or on California farms—and found that their
languages, dialects, and cultural practices cut them off from fellow
immigrant Catholics. They were victims of anti-Catholic invective and
even violence. For these and other reasons—like culture, language,
race, Protestant indoctrination in public schools—Catholics tended to
be educated in Roman Catholic schools at all levels, which reinforced
their separation from American popular culture and their develop¬
ment of an alternative, parallel route to Americanization.
Catholic life guidebooks of this period, mostly aimed at literate
English speakers, agreed on two strategies that perfectly reflected
Catholic ambivalence toward American culture. On one hand they
reinforced the divide between Catholics and other Americans gener¬
ally by appealing to Catholic virtue-centered piety and warning of
354 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

the spiritual dangers of reading popular novels, associating with non-

Catholics, and above all marrying outside the faith. On the other, like
Protestant guides, they both demurred to mention sexuality directly6
(preferring the more circumspect term “purity”) and paradoxically
often made impurity the central example of sin or even implied that it
lay at the root of all other vices.
An excellent exemplar of this double strategy is George Deshon, a
West Point graduate, Catholic convert, and priest who was one of the
founding members of the Paulist order. His Guide for Young Catholic
Women in domestic service went through thirty-two editions in the
De9shon *autho^ou he&vide 'ate nineteenth century. Deshon warned that “impurity” was a vice
for Young Catholic Women, that destroyed “all goodness, all virtue, all love of God, all faith, hope,
sicmarySoS of St* Paul or charity” He lectured too on evil thoughts and roving eyes, sexual
the Apostle sins that a penitent might have neglected to confess unless her confes¬
sor was forthright or salacious enough to inquire
about them. Still, his practical concerns about
“the loss of that good name without which life is
a burden” and about the possibility that physical
attraction could induce a girl to marry an alco¬
holic and become the “bloated, coarse-looking
woman” “who has not, apparently, combed her
hair for a week, with a lot of ragged children bawl¬
ing, and fighting, and cursing around her in her
miserable, dirty hovel”7 could easily be found in
any girls’ advice book of the period. They reveal
important underlying cultural assumptions about
sex: in order to preserve her reputation, a woman
must guard not only her purity but her appear¬
ance of purity, and frequent sex (symbolized by
the “lot of ragged children,” in comparison with
the few, well-mannered children of a well-to-do,
presumably more continent couple) correlates to
the vices of drunkenness and irresponsibility.
The psychology of Roman Catholic writings
of this period is complex. They combined rigor¬
ous, hyper self-critical vigilance in every imagin¬
able dimension of thought and comportment with
 Popular Catholic Sexual Ethics Traina 355

a comparatively benevolent pastoral realism. Early twentieth-century

Catholic vigilance against bodily temptation is the stuff of which sat¬
ires and bitter memoirs have been made. The body was the enemy.
Tentler writes that in the popular literature of this period, sexuality
(along with the body, its exclusive residence) was seen as “external to
the moral self and powerfully subversive of it.”8
Madame Cecilia is typical. She was an author of scripture com¬
mentaries; her More Short Spiritual Readings for Mary’s Children was
inspired by a vision of the Gospels that equated holiness with purity
from contamination. The person was a house with three stories: the
body at ground level, the intellect above that, and the soul at the top.
The holy girl was to occupy only the top floor, but she must keep con¬
stant guard at the front door of the lower floor: “Temptations against
the angelic virtue of purity come in through the doors of the senses.
Consequently, we must avoid all looks, words, or actions which would
compromise the purity of our souls.” Because “the soul imprisoned
in the body looks out on the world by the windows of the eyes,”9 one
must especially train ones eyes to look at only what was chaste and
uplifting—and also avoid glances that might suggest flirtation. This
constant vigilance was a matter of salvation. For Deshon, impurity
was “a monster with jaws wide open to destroy us. It is the very pit of
hell which yawns wide at our feet, ready to swallow up those who do
not watch their steps with the utmost precaution.”10
Not surprisingly, early twentieth-century Catholic clergy were so
anxious to protect the eyes and ears from sights and sounds that might
inspire lust that they barely alluded to sex in mixed-company Sunday
sermons. Tentler relates that they often aimed their mission (or “revival”)
preaching and writing on sex to single-sex audiences, separating the
single women from single men and from the married—and sometimes
even husbands from wives—when they preached missions.11 This habit
may have implied to their hearers that sex was properly a matter of pri¬
vate morality (even though it was not only interpersonal but also had
grave social consequences), and more importantly that open discus¬
sion of it risked arousing morally dangerous levels of sexual interest. It
would certainly have been inappropriate for clergy to invite laypeople
to events that were occasions of sin! The same anxiety may also explain
why manuals for married couples appear to have been rare.
356 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

The overriding concern was to avoid sin by trying to avoid all that
might produce it: knowingly visiting places, associating with people,
reading books, engaging in flirtations and intimacies, and even wel¬
coming daydreams that might arouse desire were all strictly forbid¬
den. In his short chapter “Custody of the Eyes,” Deshon warns that
“your mind will become filled with the images and pictures of what
your eyes behold. So, if you look on any impure sight to notice it, it
will be sure to create evil thoughts in your mind”12 (emphasis mine).
But because their second purpose was to prepare readers for the sac¬
rament of penance—which mental events needed to be confessed,
and which did not?—he and Madame Cecilia were also fascinatingly
realistic, and even lenient, on the question of unintentional acts. Con¬
sistent with Catholic moral theology and penitential practice, a person
who happened to see an impure sight and quickly diverted her atten¬
tion and thoughts was neither culpable nor contaminated. Similarly,
Deshon said, “our imaginations and our fancies are not always in our
power.”13 Impure thoughts happen even to the saints. Consequently,
added Madame Cecilia, one should not waste time feeling guilty about
them: “these thoughts are powerless to stain the soul unless they are
deliberately accepted and welcomed.”14
This important distinction between independently arising
thoughts and their intentional cultivation creates space for later
engagement with psychology. What divides these early twentieth-
century thinkers from their successors is the formers’ assumption that
spontaneously arising sexual thoughts are not benign or natural but
are the devil’s means of tempting the holy, and they must be resisted
by calling upon God and the Virgin Mary. In addition, they found it
easy to enumerate the dangers of illicit or frequent sexual relations,
masturbation, onanism, and other transgressions but difficult to list
any benefits of “fulfilling the marital debt” other than procreation
and avoidance of adultery. Even “good sex” was morally fraught and
preferably infrequent. Catholics who read and heeded this literature
were likely to be tied in knots of scrupulous self-examination: Did
I invite that impure thought by dressing too warmly or eating rich
food? Did I desire my wife too ardently? But it is likely—at this stage,
at least—that an equal or greater number remained blissfully ignorant
of these worries.
 Popular Catholic Sexual Ethics Traina 357

THE DISCOVERY OF PSYCHOLOGY

By the end of the Second World War Catholic culture had undergone
almost unimaginable change. Buoyed by national prosperity, literacy,
higher education funded by the GI Bill, assimilation, proof of good
citizenship through support for two world wars, and the cultural expo¬
sure that war travel had brought their young men, American Catho¬
lics were now eager participants in American economic and popular
culture. The cumulative effect of all these changes on the Catholic lay
culture of sexuality should not be underestimated. Although some
postwar Catholics—particularly some clergy and women religious—
continued to fear that all discussion and exhibition of sexuality were
equally morally dangerous, other Catholics began to make distinc¬
tions between constructive and purely salacious presentations.
This transformation was evident even at the popular level. For
instance, in his 1960 film La Dolce Vita, Federico Fellini gambled that
sex could function legitimately as a social critique rather than neces¬
sarily and solely as an illicit turn-on. And he won. The Catholic film
censor board, the Legion of Decency, awarded the film a “separate
classification” rather than a “disapproved for all” rating.
In addition, two important developments had cleared the way
for tentative affirmation of marital sex as a good beyond procreation.
First, Pius XI’s 1930 encyclical Casti connubii (On Christian Marriage)
declared that sex also has important “secondary ends, such as mutual
aid, the cultivating of mutual love, and the quieting of concupiscence”
(para. 59). These secondary ends would later be picked up under the
label “unitive ends of marriage” and elevated to a level equal with
procreation in Pope Paul Vi’s 1968 encyclical Humanae vitae (On
the Regulation of Birth). Second, by the mid-1930s knowledge of the
rhythm method, which allowed couples to discourage or encourage
conception by restricting intercourse to limited periods in the wife’s
fertility cycle, was fairly widespread. Although critics charged that
rhythm was morally inferior to the more challenging practice of com¬
plete abstinence, much of the informational literature produced for
laypeople emphasized intercourse’s value as an expression of love and
communion.15 The idea of intercourse as a positive force in marriage
had not taken over, but it had taken root.
358 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

Finally, development of an assimilated, educated Catholic middle

class produced a sizable elite of Catholic families who were highly
informed about church teaching, attempted to live it as much as
possible in daily life, and openly discussed the
challenges of doing so. One telling indicator
Sex and Romanticism
was British author David Lodges 1965 comic
"Not very romantic," Virginia seemed
indistinctly to say. "Sex isn't," he
novel The British Museum Is Falling Down,16
snapped back. which meditated hilariously and painfully on the
—David Lodge, The British Museum fraughtness of life under the rhythm method. That
Is Falling Down (New York: Penguin, Lodge could expect the average American reader
1981 [1965], 156. of his light novel to follow discussions of medieval
moral theology, references to papal documents,
and even a dream that parodied members of the Roman curia indi¬
cates that the Catholic middle class (and maybe the whole middle
class) was rather well-informed in matters of Catholic moral theology
of sexuality, its justifications, and its frustrations. Appreciative readers
might well have been members of the Christian Family Movement,
a postwar, mostly lay-led organization of primarily well-educated,
suburban, white Catholic families. Although they focused on liturgi¬
cal and social issues too, uppity “CFMers” discussed responsible pro¬
creation and the difficulties of the rhythm method at length; Pat and
Patty Crowley, long at the center of the organization, were two of the
few laypeople called to Rome to reexamine the question of contracep¬
tion before Paul Vi’s publication of Humanae vitae.
Not surprisingly, Catholic life guides in this transitional period
were extremely varied. Priests and religious continued to produce
daily meditation guides for single women that echoed the turn-of-
the-century vision of sex, procreation, and the body. Jesuit author
Raoul Plus, whose 1927 Facing Life: Meditations for Young Women
continued to be published through 1960, railed against scantily clad
girls who become occasions of sin for others; he praised holy women
who insisted on covering themselves modestly even while on the
scaffold or being gored by bulls.17 He also condemned contraception.
Edging perilously close to heresy, he argued, “One might almost say
that there are souls which God has not been able to create, because
selfishness has reared a barrier between these souls and the will of
God”18 (emphasis mine). Father Camillo Zamboni, whose 1961 book
 Popular Catholic Sexual Ethics Traina 359

Jesus Speaks to You thankfully seems to have had only one printing,
recalls medieval spirituality.19 In chapters with titles like “Do Not
Offend Me Again” and “I Await You, My Beloved,”
Zamboni idiosyncratically merges two streams of
On Chastity
traditional Catholic devotionalism in the same
Chastity... is not a precept that is
voice: a Father God who attends minutely to
distinctively Catholic or distinctively
every sin of vanity and impurity and a Lover God
Christian or Jewish, but it is distinc¬
who satisfies all longing. Both authors’ clerical tively human. According to Catholic
authority is backed by ecclesiastical approvals (an teaching, it binds every human being,
imprimatur for both, and a nihil obstat for Plus) regardless of race or creed.
guaranteeing orthodoxy. —Gerald Kelly, S.J., in collaboration
Two other volumes by priests (bending under with B. R. Fulkerson, S.J., and
the weight of the nihil obstat, imprimatur, and C. F. Whitford, S.J., Modern Youth and

imprimi potest) echo this earlier tradition but Chastity (St. Louis: Queen's Work,
1941), 62.
hint at important changes. Gerald Kelly’s Modern
Youth and Chastity, first published in 1941, also
saw service well into the postwar period and formed a whole genera¬
tion of American Catholics. Like his predecessors, the Jesuit Kelly laid
out the dangers of stimulating the sexual appetite. Yet by naming and
matching particular sexual activities with degrees and kinds of sin he
demystified the sections of moral theology manuals (often still pub¬
lished in Latin) that guided priests in hearing confessions of sexual
sin, transferring both the power for and the anxiety of cataloguing
sexual sins from priest to penitent: “A wholesome
frankness [on the part of the penitent] relieves the
confessor of the burden of asking many questions On Attractiveness
Men ... are especially attracted by
that are distasteful to him and embarrassing to the
the grace, the emotional suscepti¬
penitent.”20 The booklet was a cheerful, somewhat
bility, the beauty, the tenderness of
chatty publication aimed at middle- and upper-
women. Women are attracted by the
class college students of both sexes, referring
strength, the courage, the energy, the
briefly to the appropriate joys of married sex and calm deliberation of men."
openly exploring what it called “the psychology of —Gerald Kelly, S.J., in collaboration
sex attraction.” In the same vein, Joseph Haley’s with B. R. Fulkerson, S.J., and
Accent on Purity (1948) extolled modesty, mortifi¬ C. F. Whitford, S.J., Modern Youth and
cation (self-denial), and the grand design of God, Chastity (St. Louis: Queen's Work,
who creates sexual desire and marriage to ensure 1941), 13.

procreation; it assailed reductionistic “scientific”

360 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

descriptions of human sexuality. Still, its audience and purpose were

radically new: it provided priests, nuns, and lay religious educators
with models for comprehensive “purity education” curricula, remind¬
ing them that sex is a good that deserves to be discussed and con¬
demning the “puritanic attitude” that treats sexuality generally as an
unmentionable.21 It signaled a change of perspective that resulted in
a veritable cascade of new books on sexuality for both educators and
the general laity.
Implicit in these shifts were two important, related changes. First,
the question of authority—who had the knowledge and the authoriza¬
tion to teach about sexuality?—shaped the whole period. In a refresh¬
ing departure from early twentieth-century silence, Haley insisted that
students learn the physiology of sexuality from medical professionals
outside the religious education classroom and the theology and mor¬
als of sexuality within it. Implicit in this position is a doctrine of dual
but complementary authority: doctors and nurses had authority over
the physical dimension of sexuality, and (celibate) priests and nuns
had authority over its moral and spiritual dimensions. In one Chris¬
tian Brothers high school in the mid-1960s, students received separate
presentations on sex and marriage from both medical doctors and
an elderly—and presumably pastorally experienced—brother. It was
assumed that the three authorities—that of the elderly brother, his
safely orthodox interpretation of ordinary sexual experience, and sci¬
entific wisdom—complemented rather than contradicted each other.
But this facile division of labor and authority was already eroding
in the face of developmental psychology. Psychology was the most
powerful intellectual and scientific development of the mid-twenti¬
eth century. Developmental psychology in particular was friendly to
highly educated Catholics interested in revivifying religious educa¬
tion, pastoral care, and the sacrament of penance, three of the prac¬
tices in the life of the church that most profoundly shaped lay visions
of sexuality.22
Psychology’s role in mid-century sex guides was complex. For
centuries Roman Catholic theology had steadfastly assumed that
good science and revelation could not conflict. Thus, where psycho¬
logical studies agreed with church teaching, they were summoned in
support, and where they did not, they were dismissed as bad science.
 Popular Catholic Sexual Ethics Traina 361

For example, Alphonse Clemens encouraged couples to make use of

Albert Kinseys research into male and female arousal patterns, but
he rejected Kinsey’s correlation between women’s marital orgasm and
their marital satisfaction as antithetical to Catholic teaching on mar¬
riage. Still, theological credibility benefited from scientific confirma¬
tion, so Clemens cited an earlier psychological study in support of his
claim that women’s marital happiness did not depend on high rates
of orgasm. And he offered wives a scientifically certified consolation
prize: the theory that women’s absorption of semen promotes their
psychological well-being, even without orgasm.23 Later, psychology’s
contradictory findings would not be so easily dismissed.
Another important theme sounded consistently in later literature
of this period was that psychology and sociobiology confirmed divine
design. Male-female complementarity was generic and comprehen¬
sive, psycho-spiritual as well as physical, and was directed toward
procreation, parenting, and disparate roles within family and society:
“man” naturally and inherently turned outward to the world and Fig. 15.2. Photo of a large
British Catholic family, four
“woman” inward to the household and to motherhood. Women’s roles of whose sons (in cameo
were usually more narrowly described than men’s: Francois Dantec shots in each corner)
became Redemptorist
opined, “Motherhood is a woman’s natural function, a function she priests. Photo © Transalpine
is meant to fulfill both by her physical nature and by every faculty Redemptorists.

of her mind and heart.”24 Haley added

ominously but typically, “it is the law of
nature that women are to set the ideal of
purity in society.”25
Not surprisingly, any other sort of
attraction or any other view of sex was
believed to subvert the natural order
of things revealed by God and con¬
firmed by psychology and sociobiol¬
ogy. In Clemens, the “Divine Plan for
sex,” including male-female attraction,
was intended “to keep the human race
alive”26—a modern version of a tradi¬
tional theological move, but also oddly
deterministic. Couples wanting sex but
not children would therefore not be just
362 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

selfish or sinful but also psychologically maladjusted and biologically

obstructionist. Not surprisingly, Clemens declared sex not prompted
by love animalistic, called sex “diverted from its natural goal of gen¬
eration” subanimalistic—for not even animals perverted sex in this
way27—and did not mention homosexuality at all.
The themes of psychological and lay authority met tellingly in
the work of lay authors—including women—with advanced degrees
in psychology. Clemens’s 1957 book Marriage and the Family: An
Integrated Approach for Catholics beautifully illustrates the careful
blending of this new authority with the clerical traditionalism of
earlier periods. To begin with, although the “Alphonse” conjured
visions of a priest or vowed brother, it was followed only by the initials
“Ph.D.”; likewise, the title page declared that Clemens was director
of the Marriage Counseling Center (psychological connection) at
Catholic University (church connection). By dedicating the work to
“Our Lady, my wife, and my mother,” Clemens proclaimed himself
both an adherent of traditional devotionalism and a man experienced
in marriage and sexual relations. The pages were sprinkled liberally
with notes to Catholic teaching and the works of psychologists. Even
the book’s production planted its feet firmly in two intellectual com¬
munities: it was published by a trade press, but it bore both the nihil
obstat and the imprimatur. And from the very first page, Clemens
paid homage to two authorities: “At this time both religion and sci¬
ence agree that the chief reason for failing marriages is the absence
of proper and adequate preparation”28—preparation that presum¬
ably should be informed by good psychology but guided by Catholic
values. The church “baptized” the “good” science of Kelly and others,
lay and clerical, by awarding imprimaturs and nihil obstats to their
burgeoning literature on sexuality and marriage (most frequently,
sexuality in marriage).
These psychologically informed guides on marriage, sexuality,
and sex education differed markedly from their predecessors. In
early guides, the important distinction was between the unmarried
state (in which sex was forbidden and all temptations to it were to be
avoided) and the married state (in which sex was permissible “to pay
the debt” and produce children but was still a site of moral danger). In
postwar guides, although intercourse was still confined to marriage,
 Popular Catholic Sexual Ethics I Traina 363

the important pedagogical distinction was not state but stage: they
emphasized the developmental progress of intellect, emotions, and
sexuality in each person and even in each marriage.
In addition, many aimed at a more sophisticated audience with
clear pedagogical purpose—in Clemens’s case, Catholic priests, but
also the lay counselors, educators, and parents who had begun to
replace priests and nuns as the mediators of ecclesiastical teaching.
Appropriately, their tone was more often collegial than condescend¬
ing. Dr. Audrey Kelly, who with Gerald Kelly also symbolizes the
arrival of assimilated Irish Catholicism, personifies this trend. Catho¬
lic adults raised in an era of hyper vigilance and awkward silence
about sex needed expert, sympathetic support for their new role as sex
educators. Kelly’s A Catholic Parent’s Guide to Sex Education offered
these anxious parents a no-nonsense tour of basic anatomy and physi¬
ology, followed by chapters on sexual development and education at
each of several crisply delineated developmental stages, capped off by
frank discussions of homosexuality, venereal disease, masochism, and
sadism—and a word of encouragement urging “late starters” to open
the subject with their children as soon as possible.29
Oddly, even these more modern authors eschewed candid discus¬
sion of the mechanics of sex and the challenges of birth regulation.
They no longer feared that sex education would arouse lust, but with
Clemens they harbored a paternalistic worry that any discussion of
technique would encourage laypeople to view sex mechanically, rather
than holistically, placing too much weight on sexual prowess and too
little on dimensions of marriage that were far more essential to marital
success.30 This worry seems to have persisted among Catholics to the
end of the century, despite the notable proliferation of explicit, liber¬
ally illustrated sex guides among equally conservative Protestants. In
addition, most later postwar guides played down the challenges of
“the safe method” and played up the potential of periodic abstinence
(and of raising children) to develop virtues of self-restraint and self¬
lessness in married couples. Lurking in the background was anxiety
over rising divorce rates: Could Catholics harness the wisdom of the
new psychology to strengthen marriage without ceding their beliefs
about marriage as an indissoluble sacrament and marital sex as a
pathway to parenthood?
364 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

Two final, related characteristics point toward the manuals of

the late twentieth century. Both are grounded in a curious optimism.
The first is an absence: the postwar manuals seemed to assume that
although a couple might be misdirected or selfish, both partners were
usually of one mind and of equally good will. They shied away from
questions like “What it I have medical reasons to prevent pregnancy,
but my husband forces himself on me?” or “How may I protect myself
if I suspect my spouse has contracted a sexually transmitted disease
elsewhere?" Sexual sin was assumed to be pesky' and spiritually but
not physically dangerous.
Second, the authors went out of their way to extol the blessings of
marital sex, in an effort both to elevate marriage (the Cana marriage
movement was in full swing) and to overcome earlier fears of desire's
dangerous power. Guides praising marriage and married sex prolif¬
erated at an astounding rate. The earlier focus on squelching sexual
feelings outside marriage gave way to a focus on encouraging sexual
affection inside marriage. Formerly the door to sin and temptation, the
body was now the route to graced marital union. This was the begin¬
ning of the inkling that a good marriage ideally involves good sex.
Francois Dantec, whose 1952 marriage guide Love Is Life was adapted
for the American market in 1963, devoted well over a third of its pages
to questions of sexual relations and family planning. T. W. Burke's The
Gold Ring intoned that God intended sex to be “an act of intense plea¬
sure” for both partners.31 And Clemens agreed that “though sex is a
minor portion of the totality' of married life, it is an extremely impor¬
tant one.”32 It might in some sense be even more important than bear¬
ing children. In The Meaning of Marriage Herbert Doms—writing in
1939 but anticipating the postwar approach—waxed rhapsodic with¬
out loss of his imprimatur by allowing a nineteenth-century author to
speak for him: in “marital chastity” the partners were “united not only
by love and sensual pleasure, but by delight and moral jov in a com¬
munity which fully satisfies the natural instincts to which it conforms.
From the subjective point of view the child is, [sic] only a secondary
purpose of marriage.”33
Indeed, marriage manuals of the period praised the goodness of
married, sexual love so highly that it seemed a prerequisite for human
spiritual and emotional development. Clemens argued that “the entire
 Popular Catholic Sexual Ethics | Traina 365

human personality, even in its supernatural aspects, is prospered by

sex since the act of marital love also merits grace”; “the deeper love
generated by it generates overflows in charity toward neighbors; the
very incompleteness of it causes the soul to yearn for perfect union
with God.”34 True to his trademark double-barreled approach, he also
cited statistics showing that marriage is good for health, lowering
mortality rates across the board.35 Flamand believed that physical love
helped to accomplish interior, mysterious transformations, produc¬
ing a “kind of human fulfillment... possible only in married love.”36
These claims hint that married sex might be developmental^ neces¬
sary to emotional maturity and spiritual fulfillment, challenging the
long-standing Catholic culture of celibacy as the spiritual high road
and marriage as the way of compromise.
Equally unexpectedly, freedom to enjoy married sex sometimes
became a command to do so. Burke demanded that mere human
beings accomplish a union as pure and high-minded as the eucharist:
“Bodily union is the ‘sacrament’ of human marriage, while the Eucha¬
rist is that of the marriage between Christ and his Church”—or at least
“this is the ideal to be sought and achieved” by married couples.37 It
also signals that the carefully distilled “psychological self” cautiously
embraced by postwar sex manual writers might have contained
more of Protestant popular cultures belief in the necessity of pair¬
ing and sexual pleasure than intended. Two things are clear. First, if
the authors of the new books exited the postwar period in a state of
euphoria over the blessings of married sexuality, this level of com¬
fort with sex had not yet filtered down to the general laity, who still
struggled with scrupulous consciences. Second, the new canonization
of married sexuality was of little comfort to those whose desire took
a different shape.

SACRED PLEASURE
Pope Paul Vi’s 1968 encyclical Humanae vitae (On the Regulation of
Birth) capped off the postwar explosion of books on sexuality and
marriage. Preceded by unprecedented consultation with a few mar¬
ried laypeople (who presented often-anguished written testimonies
366 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

from thousands more), the document was widely expected to embrace

sexual pleasure as a true marital good and to pronounce the churchs
blessing on limited marital contraceptive use. It emphatically agreed
to the first, raising sex’s emotional/spiritual or “unitive” purpose to an
equal level with its procreative purpose and even embracing the idea
of family limitation, but it rejected the second, declaring that each and
every act of intercourse must be free from both physical and pharma¬
ceutical barriers to the union of sperm and ovum.
Much has been written on the effect of this event on Ameri¬
can Catholic consciousness. Many faithful Catholics—including the
majority of well-educated, self-organized Christian Family Movement
members—were shocked and disappointed. Over two decades priests,
bishops, theologians, and knowledgeable laypeople had collaborated
in a tentative but increasingly open, critical process of describing the
spiritual and “human” meanings of marital sex. The logical conclusion,
according to these Catholics, was that marriages would be less anxious,
and unexpected children rarer, if couples could use contraception judi¬
ciously (Tender notes that 78 percent of married American Catholic
women between twenty and twenty-four were using some forbidden
method of birth regulation in 1970, shortly after the encyclical was
issued38). Humanae vitae signaled the church hierarchy’s rejection of
this new, collaborative, multidisciplinary approach to truth, and thus
the end of what these Catholics had come to regard as Catholicism.
For others, Humanae vitae confirmed that lay-clerical collabora¬
tion could only interpret traditional teaching in the new language of
psychology. The nihil obstats and imprimaturs on the mid-century
manuals had been meant to say “this far, but no farther”: psychology
helps us understand how from a subjective, experiential viewpoint sex
might be about emotional union, and mutual pleasure might be indis¬
pensable in marriage, but unless sex was at least open to conception it
put pleasure before marriage’s main objective, natural, and canonical
goal: birthing and nurturing children. For these Catholics, Humanae
vitae pulled the church back from the brink of ceding its authority to
secular scientific reason, reminding everyone that the one truth was
revealed and changeless and that the pope was its interpreter.
The immediate consequence was a deep split that skewed the
Catholic sex-and-marriage advice literature. Dismayed progressives
 Popular Catholic Sexual Ethics I Traina 367

put pen to paper to denounce the encyclicals vision of authority and

sexuality, but their audience was more scholarly than popular. Pro¬
gressive lay Catholics seem to have turned to Protestant and secular
sexuality guides rather than producing their own.
Thus by the last decade of the twentieth century, rounding the
cusp of the twenty-first, self-consciously Catholic guides made a
point of strictly and wholeheartedly embracing church teaching. Only
a few decades separated them from their mid-century predecessors,
but their position in American culture was completely different.
First, as most Protestants now favored birth control, Humanae vitae
made opposition to contraception the hallmark of American Catholi¬
cism. Thenceforth, orthodox Catholic identity would be defined and
declared primarily in writing on marriage and sexuality. In addition,
whereas the burden of the mid-century guides was to argue for the
goodness of pleasurable marital sex, the later guides took this as a
given. Sometimes trading on their authors’ own bad experiences of
casual sex, and nearly always on their clients’, they sought instead to
demonstrate why nonmarital and contracepted sex of all sorts were
great evils.
Consequently these guides championed church teachings rather
than challenged them. Trading ecclesiastical authority for the author¬
ity of a trusted commercial brand, they tended to be published by
Catholic presses with a reputation for orthodoxy—like Our Sunday
Visitor or Ignatius Press—often dispensing with ecclesiastical certi¬
fications. They courted the “great sex” generation by offering readers
a carrot: although there’s more to life than sex, God wants them to
have great sex, and they will have superlative sex only if they do it
the orthodox Catholic way; liberal, contracepted, nonmarital sex is
mediocre by comparison.
The books’ style was as much a part of this effort as their content.
Their authors—typically lay—often worked the motivational speaking
and relationship workshop circuit. Witty and engaging, they enticed
the reader with amusing asymmetries and allusions (Gregory Popcak
titled a chapter “‘Holy Sex, Batman!’ [or Why Catholics Do It... Infal¬
libly]”).39 Their chatty style, conventional wisdom, and question-and-
answer format echoed two familiar contemporary genres: “self-help”
books and Protestant evangelical apologetics.
368 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

The best-known representatives of this move¬

ment are Mary Beth Bonacci’s Real Love, Christo¬
The Key to Sexual Satisfaction
The most sexually satisfied people
pher Wests Good News about Sex and Marriage,
in America ... are ... highly religious and Gregory Popcak’s many manuals on marriage
married people who have saved sex and parenting.40 Like the mid-century authors,
for marriage. they began with God’s intention. According to
—Mary Beth Bonacci, Real Love: Mary Beth Bonacci, “Not only is sex good, but
Mary Beth Bonacci Answers Your it is amazingly good, for more reasons than you
Questions on Dating, Marriage may think. Why did God create the world? To fill
and the Real Meaning of Sex (San it up with individual, irreplaceable, unrepeatable
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996), 36. people—each one of whom He is madly in love
with and wants to share eternity with... . This is
where sex enters the picture. God needed to design a system to get
us all here.”41 When human beings adhered to this logical system,
they reaped spiritual and physical rewards. Popcak argued, “sacred
lovemaking .. . helps the spouses experience, in a physical way, how
passionately they are loved by God”42
Fig. 15.3. The Art of Natural All authors—drawing on Humanae vitae and Pope John Paul Us
Family Planning by John F.
Kippley and Sheila K. Kip- extensive theology of the body—argued that when a couple was com¬
pley, 3rd edition (Cincinnati: pletely vulnerable and self-giving, actively welcoming a possible new
Couple to Couple League,
1984). Used by permission. child in every act of sex by refusing to impede pregnancy, they also
partook in both God’s original creative ecstasy and
the promise of heaven. Popcak puts it this way: “To
experience sacred sex is to experience the cataclysmic
eruption of love that was the cosmological orgasm we
call the ‘Big Bang.’”43 Christopher West agreed: “The
joy of sex—in all its orgasmic grandeur—is meant to
be the joy of loving as God loves. The joy of sex—in
all its orgasmic grandeur—is meant to be a foretaste
of the joys of heaven: the eternal consummation
of the marriage between Christ and the Church.”44
Regular self-denial only magnified this ecstasy. Pop¬
cak claimed, “Men and women who practice periodic
abstinence have reported more intense and frequent
orgasms than other couples. God always rewards his
Natural > faithful.”45
Family Planning All three authors embraced a physico-psycho-
spiritual determinism that traded on both the idea of
 Popular Catholic Sexual Ethics I Traina 369

act as language (a newer idea) and sociobiology (car¬

ried forward from mid-century). Acts were words with
single meanings. According to Popcak, “every time a | GifM"' Wiw

married couple [makes] love, they [are] physically t0£il4

restating their wedding vows to each other—in fact, rv/afl
they [are] celebrating the sacrament of marriage.”46
For Bonacci, “Sex speaks one language and one
language alone”: “Sex has an inherent meaning. It
iririrr.
means ‘forever.’”47 West agreed: “Sexual intercourse
speaks.... the language of the marriage bond, the
FOR
language of wedding vows. Anything less is a cheap
BETTER.
counterfeit for what our hearts truly desire.”48 Sex in
any other context, or contracepted sex, was literally a FOREVER!
lie,49 because it contradicted the meaning that God Mmm f

assigned to the word-act of sex.50

Gregory K. Popcak. MSW, L.CSW
Although West preferred to remain on the sym¬
bolic plane, Popcak and Bonacci reinforced their
point through a new version of the sociobiological argument. God Fig. 15.4. For Better...
Forever! A Catholic Guide
wired the sacramental permanence and meaning of sexual language to Lifelong Marriage by
into our bodies through the hormone oxytocin. Bonacci called the Gregory K. Popcak (Hunting-
ton, Ind.: Our Sunday Visitor,
hormone, which is released (among other times) during sexual 1999). Photo courtesy of Our
arousal, the “superglue of the heart.”51 Its true purpose was to bond Sunday Visitor Publishing.

married couples emotionally. But, like superglue, once out of the bot¬
tle it created a permanent bond, even where none was desired. Thus,
one should “glue” oneself only to one’s carefully chosen, permanent
partner. Bonacci argued, “Once a bond forms, the brain is no longer
in charge. Feelings take over, drowning out logic.”52 Popcak likened
it to an addictive drug: when people were ‘“hopped up’ on oxytocin,”
“drugged by their own biochemistry,” they trapped themselves in bad
relationships.53 Lest we miss the point, Bonacci reiterated, “This bond
isn’t something you can consciously control.”54
The same idea underlies West’s opinion that people who do not
adhere to God’s plan for sex will “forfeit true joy, true happiness”—not
as a punishment, but simply as a logical consequence of “missfing]
the meaning of [their] existence altogether.”55 Bonacci concurred:
“Morality is just an instruction manual for your body. Sex speaks a
language—a language of permanent love. . . . You are free to take it out
of that context if you choose to, but there will be physical, emotional
370 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

and spiritual consequences. Abusing that language can hurt you—

badly.”56 Why? Breaking a premature bond inevitably damaged both
partners and made it more difficult for them to
adhere to spouses later. Like overused duct tape,
Catholics and Sex promiscuous peoples “hearts lose their adhesive¬
The non-Catholic mind cannot even
ness, their ability to bond in sexual activity.”57
begin to imagine how much real
These spiritual and psychological wounds, West
Catholics honor, esteem, and enjoy
believed, had enormous social consequences: “It’s
sex. Sex to the true Catholic is like
what relativity was to Einstein, the
difficult to find even one social evil, one element
vaccination was to Pasteur, or the of societal chaos, that is not in some way related
electric light was to Edison. to the breakdown of marriage and the misuse of
—Gregory K. Popcak, sex.”58 In sum, a person is an emotional, spiri¬
For Better... Forever! tual, physical whole. This whole is set up so that
A Catholic Guide to Lifelong Marriage when the body is used in certain ways, it creates
(Huntington, Ind.: Our Sunday Visitor, an emotional and spiritual bond between people,
1999), 201. the foundation and condition for long and happy
life together. The sin is not in giving into the body
(the body is meant to be given into), but in doing so prematurely.
To this point it would seem that sexual bonding and permanent
commitment could occur between any two people. But according to
this group of authors men and women were created to attract and
complement each other physically, emotionally, and spiritually. On
the physical level, Bonacci explains, they were intended to procre¬
ate in marriage: “If you know anything about biology, you know that
the parts are designed to work together. .. . His body is designed to
manufacture sperm. Her body is designed to receive it and possibly to
lead it to a waiting egg.”59 Popcak mapped complementary emotional
and intellectual roles to these physical differences: “At the dawn of
creation . .. while both Adam and Eve were given the responsibil¬
ity to nurture, emote, communicate, etc., God created Eve’s body to
emphasize such qualities in her life, and this emphasis was what God
called ‘femininity.’ Likewise, while both Adam and Eve were given the
responsibility to make plans, set goals, provide for their needs, solve
problems, etc., God created Adam’s body to emphasize such qualities
in his life, and this emphasis is what the Lord called ‘masculinity.’”60
West’s embrace of gender complementarity was the most compre¬
hensive. For West, marriage was the “primordial sacrament” because it
 Popular Catholic Sexual Ethics Traina 371

symbolizes Christs self-gift to the church: “Christ, our heavenly Bride¬

groom, shows us what sexual union means by making an everlasting
gift of his body to us (his Bride) on the cross,
which we receive sacramentally in the Eucharist.
The sexual union of husband and wife participates The Superiority of Christian Sex
What passes for secular, pagan 'sexu¬
in Christ’s eucharistic self-giving,” a sacrifice also
ality' is merely a shabby, tacky imita¬
fraught with pain and risk.61 Baptism, usually
tion of what sex really is. They don't
considered the foundational Christian expres¬
have the real thing; we do.
sion of God’s love and mercy, took a back seat.62
—Gregory K. Popcak, Beyond the
Consequently, for West, altering the order of
Birds and the Bees (Huntington, Ind.:
sacramental male-female procreative union did Our Sunday Visitor, 2001), 59.
not merely tinker with ethics; it threatened the
very core of the Christian doctrine of salvation.
Couples who contracepted committed sacrilege against Christ and
the church, whom their marriage symbolized.63 Here gender becomes
icon, without reference to either psychological or social reality.64
One of the chief differences between mid- and late-century works
was a decline in serious engagement with psychology. Although
Popcak has degrees in licensed clinical social work and a master’s in
social work, for the most part these recent works eschewed the exten¬
sive footnotes and doctoral degrees that certified the scholarliness of
mid-century guides. The coherence between science and theology was
assumed rather than proved. For instance, Bonacci simply said that she
was “certain” that men experience involuntary bonding in sexual rela¬
tionships; related that “a doctor once told me that female sexual satis¬
faction is in part tied to her body receiving and absorbing semen and
that her body is even designed to come to recognize and accept one
man’s sperm and to tend to reject other sperm”; and confused artificial
insemination with in vitro fertilization.65 West felt no need to back up
his suggestion that sexual disorder (rather than greed, for instance) was
the common root of all social ills. Theological citations were equally
spotty. The outlines of church teaching provided the superstructure,
but the detailed contents seemed to come primarily from the authors’
reflections on their own and their clients’ experiences.
In addition, these guides’ astonishing degree of agreement
masked an unacknowledged tension. On one hand, Popcak was so
confident that revelation accords with reason that he wrote a secular
372 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

marriage guide recommending the same practices he touted in his

self-consciously Catholic books, even prescribing scheduled monthly
“abstinence breaks” to impassion sexual relations.66 Catholic teach¬
ing on sex was just right reason; no theology was necessary. Here
he had support from another sort of manual, the Couple to Couple
League’s The Art of Natural Family Planning, which promoted the
sympto-thermal method of natural family planning (NFP) over “non-
natural” contraceptive methods.67 The authors not only embraced
science by relying on extensive research into the precise indicators of
womens fertility but also hinted that this method—because it neces¬
sarily engaged both husband and wife—made decisions about sexual
intercourse more egalitarian than they might have been if every day
were “safe.” Popcak picked up on NFP’s implications for male involve¬
ment and restraint, even recommending that boys take charge of their
teenaged sisters’ temperature charts in order to get early training in
understanding and record-keeping (although one assumes he would
disapprove of a boy telling his sister that tonight would be a safe night
for sex with her boyfriend!).68
At the other extreme, West insisted that Catholic sexual mores
cannot be understood without faith: “Sex in God’s plan is more awe¬
some than any human being could possibly dream. It’s quite literally
in-credible—that is, unbelievable. Only faith is able to believe The
great mystery.’”69 Bonacci hovered in the middle; Catholic sexual
teaching is a commonsense “owner’s manual” for the body, but some
features of sexual relations remain mysterious.70 Are Catholic sexual
ethics a matter of solid reasoning about universal human nature, or a
matter of authoritative church interpretation of sacred revelation? In
these books, the jury is still out.
One lesser known genre of the late twentieth century—predating
the 1990s but certainly following Vatican Council II—traced the path
some Catholic writing on marriage might have taken had Humanae
vitae not intervened. These were psychologically smart guides on
managing celibacy without unhealthy repression or crushing degrees
of guilt. They melded the psychological and the theological in a more
sophisticated way than most marriage and dating guides that followed
them, perhaps because the debates over gender, contraception, and
nonmarital sex were irrelevant to an audience already committed to
 Popular Catholic Sexual Ethics I Traina 373

celibacy. Their premise was that being sexual was part of being human,
but not being genitally active was a challenge in service of a vocation
that had rewards and privileges: as Patrick Carroll’s “Becoming a
Celibate Lover” put it, “loving, or even trying to love, as God loves us:
Freely, deeply, broadly, unpossessively.”71 In chapters with titles like
“Chastity and Tactility” and “The Sexual Life of a Celibate Person,”
Donald Georgen’s The Sexual Celibate declared that the path to healthy
celibacy was lined with intimate friendships in which sexual desire was
not denied or repressed; it must be accepted, examined for its mean¬
ing with the help of a counselor or spiritual director, and sometimes
even discussed with the people toward whom it was directed.72 Mary
Anne Huddlestons collection Celibate Loving: Encounter in Three
Dimensions was even more explicit about these claims. The subtitle
was a tantalizing pun. It introduced the “three dimensions” of celibacy
that organized the book (psychological, spiritual, and social), but the
immediate image of “three dimensions” was embodied relationship.
In one essay William Kraft struck a note that united all of the late-
century writings, for both married and single people: “A person, celi¬
bate or married, can refuse the call of integration and focus exclusively
on the physical nature of genitality”; instead, the goal was “to come to
feel wholly at one with genitality and to experience the spirituality of
sexuality.”73
These guides also point to the familiar unresolved tensions:
Is station or development the best yardstick for measuring sexual
behavior? How is the authority of ecclesiastical moral theology related
to the authority of developmental psychology? Wests nuptial theol¬
ogy and Bonacci’s emphasis on waiting until marriage echoed early
twentieth-century visions of marriage and celibacy as ecclesiastical
vocations, states with static rules, not dynamic processes with evolv¬
ing standards. Popcaks response to the question was “both/and.” He
embraced developmental views of both single sexuality and marriage.
Yet he believed that both processes could and must be navigated
within Catholic moral guidelines. Georgen, who envisioned life as
an unending journey toward perfection, embraced a developmental
vision of chastity that was only slightly more permissive than the
gradualist description of chastity in the most recent Catechism of the
Catholic Church: “Chastity is a process, an unfinished one, life-long. It
374 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

is something we long for; it is something we pray for. Celibate chastity,

as an ideal, is seldom perfectly realized in the concrete. Yet it must be
continually sought and held up as an ideal.” On the path to the goal,
desire might, and probably would, burst forth occasionally in mas¬
turbation. Hardly Deshons yawning pit of hell, masturbation merely
“points to the unfinishedness of the process of spiritualization. To be
unfinished is not to be immoral nor irresponsible. It is, however, to be
challenged toward further growth. We must accept unfinishedness but
not choose to remain there.”74 Georgen explicitly accepted a fact some
others ignore: psychology had not just interpreted moral theology but
subtly altered it, bringing former mortal sins under the less-threaten¬
ing heading of growing pains.
We leave the twentieth century with these three apparently very
different expressions of the moral life: to adhere strictly to the rules
inscribed in biology and theology, to strive toward maturity within
the limits of these rules, to strive toward psycho-spiritual maturity
so as perhaps to adhere to the ecclesiastical ideal eventually. Yet all
concurred in one belief: if you are single, God wants you to have inti¬
mate, nongenital friendships; if you are married, God wants you to
have the most passionate, exciting sex life you can possibly imagine.
To the surprise of disappointed Vatican II progressives, who found
the later manuals rigid and restrictive and who pointed to high rates
of contraceptive use among married Catholics (estimates run to
95 percent), this consensus generated great excitement among some
young adult and college-age Catholics disillusioned by a culture of
“hooking up.” These youthful enthusiasts felt freed by their embrace of
newfound reverence, sacramentality, and self-denial and felt respected
by authors who responded to their hunger for meaning with frank,
experiential reasoning.

FULL CIRCLE
By the turn of the twenty-first century, both traditionalist and pro¬
gressive Catholic writings on sexuality had sold out to culture, if dif¬
ferently. Their common belief in the agreement of faith and reason led
them to give slightly different advice: on the one hand, follow church
 Popular Catholic Sexual Ethics | Traina 375

teaching, and your sex life will top the secular charts; on the other, use
the best of psychologically informed contemporary sexual culture to
transform church teaching. But all the dating and marriage manuals
sold hot sex for straight couples. Deaf to the warnings of Protestant
guides (like Lauren Winner’s Real Sex75) about the “fun” of illicit
liaisons and the comforting ordinariness of much married lovemak¬
ing, they argued that fidelity to church teaching was the pathway to
phenomenal sex—and they implied that if you were not having phe¬
nomenal sex, you were not trying hard enough to be a good spouse.
Celibacy guides indicated that desire was no longer considered too
arousing to discuss. Rather, sexual feelings were too arousing not to
discuss—they must be named and dealt with openly if they were not
to lead to disastrous consequences. The homosexual desires that flus¬
tered the marriage-manual authors found comfortable treatment here.
For heterosexual and homosexual celibates, repression was passe.
Still, this is not the end of the story. The American Roman Catho¬
lic church was surprisingly similar at the turn of the twentieth century
and at the turn of the twenty-first. All recent guides on sex target an
acculturated, relatively well-educated population. Yet in 2005 over
12 percent of Americans were foreign-born, and some sources placed
the Catholic proportion of this immigrant population at over 40 per¬
cent. Other sources estimated the immigrant Latino Catholic popula¬
tion at thirteen million, which amounts to approximately 17 percent
of American Catholics.76 During both periods the American Catholic
Church was composed of two populations with very different pastoral
needs: assimilated, fairly well-educated Catholics who were formed as
much by American civic, mostly Protestant, culture as by their own
religious tradition, and poor and less-educated recent immigrants
for whom simple survival—often in isolation from familiar tradi¬
tions and from family—was the most immediate concern. There are
important differences, of course: the virulent anti-Catholicism of the
early twentieth century had abated by the end, removing one barrier
to comfortable identification with American culture; the proportions
had shifted from an immigrant majority to an immigrant minority
within Catholicism; and the cultural norm had shifted from studied
reticence about sex to open and almost constant conversation. All of
these changes profoundly affected the literature on sexuality produced
376 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

for American lay consumption. But the continuing tension between

immigration and assimilation reminds us that Catholic views on
sexuality had not yet reached equilibrium, and Catholic literature on
sexuality was not reaching everyone.

FOR FURTHER READING

Burns, Jeffrey M. Disturbing the Peace: A History of the Christian Family Movement
1949-1974. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999
Gillespie, C. Kevin, S.J. Psychology and American Catholicism: From Confession to
Therapy? New York: Crossroad, 2001.
John Paul II [Karol Wojtyla]. Love and Responsibility. Revised edition. Trans. H. T. Wil¬
letts. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1993.
John Paul II. Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body. Trans. Michael
Waldstein. Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 2006.
Lodge, David. The British Museum Is Falling Down. New York: Penguin, 1980 [1965],
McClory, Robert. Turning Point: The Inside Story of the Papal Birth Control Commission,
and How Humanae Vitae Changed the Life of Patty Crowley and the Future of the
Church. New York: Crossroad, 1995.
Paul VI. Humanae vitae. 1968.
Pius XI. Casti connubii. 1930.
Skinner, James M. The Cross and the Cinema: The Legion of Decency and the National
Catholic Office for Motion Pictures, 1933-1970. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1993.
Tender, Leslie Woodcock. Catholics and Contraception: An American History. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2004.
LIFE AND DEATH
IN MIDDLE AMERICA

ANN M.PEDERSON
CHAPTER SIXTEEN

It was society who told these stories—we ourselves. The stories are our ways
of contextualizing technology.. . . Are there better and worse, more or less
adequate, ways of creating and telling stories? Are there criteria governing
our stories? What makes a dream true? These questions are urgent when we
reflect on technology.
—Philip Hefner1

SETTING THE STAGE

What may seem like an ending can become complicated by a begin¬
ning.* Let me explain.2 A health care professional in Sioux Falls, South
Dakota, shared a story with me that illustrates how decisions about
beginnings and endings of life and the nature of human personhood
might be more complicated than we can imagine.3 A young man was
rushed to the emergency room at a local hospital after being involved
in a serious car accident. He suffered major traumas including neck
and head injuries, and it became apparent that he would probably not
live very long. His family and his long-time girlfriend rushed to the
ER and stayed by his bedside over the course of a few days.
When it became apparent that he might not live, the family
struggled with whether or not to withdraw the respirator. Over the
minutes and hours, the family argued and struggled with this difficult
decision. The medical team indicated clearly that he would not survive
very long, and decisions were urgent. And then his girlfriend of many
years requested that the parents allow the sperm of her boyfriend to

‘Portions of this chapter were originally published as “South Dakota and Abortion: A Local Story about How Religion,
Medican Science, and Culture Meet” by Ann Milliken Pederson from Zygon, vol. 42, no. 1 (March 2007). Copyright 377
© 2007 by the Joint Publication Board of Zygon. Used by permission.
378 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

be given to her so that she could become pregnant with his child. A
beginning of new life for her would become possible even while his
would end. The parents and girlfriend could barely cope with the pres¬
ent grief, and yet they were being asked to think
about the possibility of creating new life.
Death and the Family
Questions followed for all—the parents, the
It is her restlessness that weighs on
girlfriend, the health care providers. They asked
me now. Her anguish over us—the
about life and death, endings and beginnings,
living watching the dying—the dying
watching the living. She is still the
what it means to be a person, and where God was
peacemaker trying to create a calm in all of this. To withdraw the respirator would
in the midst of her death. And there is most likely bring a quick death, but it would also
nothing she can do to ameliorate the hasten the intensity of grief for their young son.
situation.... An individual doesn't get Was the family using him as a means to deal with
cancer, a family does. their grief? Did they want to prolong his life for
—Terry Tempest Williams, his own sake or for theirs or for both? To whom
Refuge: An Unnatural History did the sperm belong? In the midst of such an
of Family and Place
urgent crisis, how would the family and girlfriend
(New York: Vintage, 1992), 214.
make these decisions? In that moment the ques¬
tions were transfigured. Decisions needed to be
made in haste. And the possibilities of making a new life from the end
of another one just didn’t make sense.
The need to make profound ethical and spiritual decisions with
such great urgency insures that the decisions will feel ambiguous,
because they are usually made in a state of bewilderment. John Lantos,
a Chicago pediatrician, writes from his experience as a physician in
the neonatal intensive care unit about this ambiguity of decisions that
crises create:

Our practices respond to the inextricably tangled web of moral

obligations within families and among family members and to the
complex negotiations that take place between doctors, patients,
and family members. Perhaps because these areas of human expe¬
rience are so complex and difficult to describe in general terms or
to regulate in rational ways, neither law nor bioethics has done a
particularly good job in exploring them. Instead, they might be
better understood through a domain of inquiry that focuses on
the complexity of the family decision making.4
 Life and Death in Middle America Pederson 379

Where can people turn as they have to make

decisions about beginnings and endings of life? Being Dead
What kinds of perspectives and wisdom, irre¬ The way I see it, being dead is not ter¬
spective of what the “authorities” have to say, are ribly far off from being on a cruise ship.
ordinary people starting to figure out and articu¬ Most of your time is spent lying on
late for themselves? As Lantos indicates, whether your back. The brain has shut down.

it is the family facing the decision, or the health The flesh begins to soften. Nothing

care provider working with the family, no clear much new happens, and nothing is
expected of you.
answers appear in the moment of urgency.5 Medi¬
—Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious
cine and technology don’t solve the questions,
Lives of Human Cadavers (New York:
but more likely complicate the answers. The same
Norton, 2003), 9.
might be said about religion. The Sioux Falls hos¬
pital scenario would not have even been possible
a few decades before. Beginnings and endings are not discrete simple
moments but are processes moving through an entire life story.
To be human is to seek meaning, to ask questions, and to tell sto¬
ries. At the end of the twentieth century, stories shaped by all of the
scientific and technological innovations radically altered peoples lives.
This story from Sioux Falls, while particular in its local context, illus¬
trates the universal human search for meaning amid the crises raised
by medical science and technology. This family realized that they
were confronting questions that, finally, were spiritual or theological
in nature. In the intensity of the moment, what once seemed familiar
and secure became blurred and unfamiliar. Even the familiar spiritual
foundations upon which so many Christians rely can seem to falter.
This ragged edge of life is where medical science and religious beliefs
intersect with profound consequences.

SETTING THE LOCAL SCENE IN SOUTH DAKOTA

A brief history of South Dakota will help to set the local scene and
the concurrent reflections about the relationship between religion and
medicine. South Dakota was the last state in the United States to get a
Starbucks and the first to pass legislation outlawing all abortions with
no exceptions other than to save the life of the mother—no exceptions
for rape or incest, or for the health of the mother. At first glance, the
380 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

media tells stories about a seemingly conservative, mostly rural state

that is at war over a cultural, religious, and even scientific issue. But to
assume that this is all there is to the narrative is to not see the whole
picture.
While the state has a relatively small population of 754,844
(according to the 2000 U.S. Census), South Dakota is comparably
larger in its physical size (seventeenth in the country). Many South
Dakotans travel great distances for services such as health care. The
racial makeup is predominantly white (88 percent) with approximately
8.5 percent of the population being Native American (third highest in
the continental United States).6 South Dakota has some of the poor¬
est counties in the United States, and approximately 20.2 percent of
children younger than six live at or below the federal poverty level.'
Poverty creates urgent public health care needs in South Dakota, par¬
ticularly among the Native American population and populations in
other isolated, rural areas. Approximately 65 percent of the people are
Protestant, and 25 percent are Roman Catholic. Lutherans make up
approximately 28 percent of the Christian population.8
At the end of the twentieth century three large hospital systems
spanned the state of South Dakota from Rapid City to Sioux Falls. Avera
Health, a Roman Catholic health care system, employs approximately
3,100 people and has about a hundred locations in South Dakota and
neighboring states.9 In recent years, tensions have developed in the state
regarding access to womens reproductive health options, like abortion
and contraception. Most of the religious perspectives expressed in the
media are from those who consider abortion a sin, except possibly to
save the life of the mother. Because of the large Roman Catholic popu¬
lation in South Dakota, the popular press often cites papal authority
and church doctrine on the issue of abortion. And yet other denomina¬
tions have much different stances, including the Evangelical Lutheran
Church in America (ELCA), of which South Dakota has a large popu¬
lation. Recently, newspaper columns by Methodists, United Church of
Christ (UCC) clergy, and Lutherans (ELCA) have been offering other
perspectives and noting that they are Christian as well.
The other major health care system, Sioux Valley Health System,
has 24 hospitals and about 150 health care facilities in South Dakota.10
For those who live near the five major cities in South Dakota, access to
 Life and Death in Middle America | Pederson 381

health care is not particularly problematic. But that leaves thousands

of folks in rural communities, where getting to hospitals or even clin¬
ics can mean traveling long distances. These local statistics indicate the
importance of location—in all of its cultural, religious, economic, and
geographic specificities, for understanding the relationship between
religion and medical science.
The religion and scientific narratives need to be told within the
larger sociopolitical economic realities of the current culture. And the
way science(s) and religion(s) are practiced in South Dakota raises
issues in the broader political and cultural landscape.

THE LARGER HISTORICAL-CULTURAL CONTEXT

At the twilight of the twentieth century, stories appeared in the news
that changed the way people understood beginnings and endings of
life. Medical technology was transforming and challenging traditional
notions of what it meant to be a human person. In 1978, Louise Joy
Brown was born to a British couple through the process of in vitro
(Latin for “in glass”) fertilization. Unable to conceive because of
blocked fallopian tubes, Lesley Brown underwent this radically novel
technological procedure that created a new life in her. By the very
end of the twentieth century, in vitro fertilization, once considered
very new, was nearly passe. In the 1990s, Dolly, a cloned sheep from
Scotland, was born, and people struggled with questions about clon¬
ing and embryonic stem cell research. The news seemed to reach every
corner of the planet. All of a sudden, people realized that the potential
of technology to change the human being far exceeded their ability to
cope with those changes. The plotline of the human story was moving
faster than the species had expected.
At the other end of life, technology once used to save a life was
withdrawn in order to end a life. Two famous stories of young women,
Karen Ann Quinlan and Nancy Cruzan, brought the issues about the
end of life and the right to die to the publics attention. Karen Ann
Quinlan and her parent’s story sharpened the cultures awareness of
how technology, medicine, religion, and politics are woven together
into one complex narrative web of living and dying. After collapsing
382 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

in April 1975 from a drug and alcohol over¬

dose, Karen remained hospitalized in a “per¬
sistent vegetative state.” At the request of her
parents, her breathing tube was removed. She
continued to breathe on her own and died
in 1985, two years after Nancy Cruzans car
accident resulted in a similar situation. At the
site of the accident, Nancy was pronounced
dead by the local patrolman. And yet, “he
could have no idea just how widely society
would debate exactly the same question that
he had answered so simply, perhaps pro¬
phetically—whether this accident victim was
dead. Nor could he know that the accident
would indeed claim other victims. But none
lay at the scene that night.”11 Nancy Cruzan,
a young woman whose story gripped the
nation, told the public about a patients rights
to die and the struggles of her family.
The story of Nancy Cruzan, while it is
clearly about her living and dying, is also
Fig. 16.1. Parents of about her family and others who found their lives tied to this ongo¬
Karen Ann Quinlan with
magazine bearing her photo, ing saga. Beginnings and endings ran concurrently through the
September 24,1977. Photo legal courts—to begin what had ended, to end what had begun.
© Bettmann/Corbis. Used by
permission. The toll on her family was unimaginable, and several years after
Nancy Cruzan died, her father committed suicide.12 Death is not
a solitary event. Unnecessary suffering was caused by the polar¬
ized positions of the media, by the polarized positions of religious
denominations, and by reactions of popular media figures like Peter
Singer and Dr. Kevorkian.
In a recent survey, 70 percent of Americans said that they wanted
to die at home, surrounded by their loved ones. And yet in South
Dakota, about 19 percent of people died at home in 1997, and the rest
died in hospitals or nursing homes.13 These figures are not atypical
for the rest of American culture. While many people at the moment
of crisis want “everything to be done,” they don’t recognize the impli¬
cations of how far technology can prolong life. A few decades ago,
 Life and Death in Middle America Pederson 383

Nancy Cruzan would have been pronounced

dead at the scene of her automobile accident, The Drama of Life and Death
and she would have remained dead. Because of Over the last twenty years in America,
technological enhancements, she was able to be both doctors and patients have tried

revived; she then stayed in a persistent vegeta¬ to tell certain stories about end-of-

tive state for years. While the statistics go up for life care in the language of bioethics

preserving life, so also do the chances of staying and in the language of legal rights.
Other stories have been told in the
in a persistent vegetative state. Taught to preserve
languages of clinical epidemiology
life at all costs, most health care providers fight
and health services research. None of
against giving up on life. This is reinforced by
these stories captures the complexity
the public attitude that technology and medicine
of the drama that the people who are
can “fix” everything. However, as right-to-die
living their lives or dying from their
cases became more prominent in the news, the deaths in the same way that fiction or
general public became more educated on end-of- poetry does.
life issues. Beginnings and endings are not discrete —John Lantos, The Lazarus Case:
simple moments but are processes moving through Life and Death Issues in
the entire human story. Neonatal Intensive Care (Baltimore:
From the incubator developed in the 1880s Johns Hopkins University Press,

to the latest technologies in the NICU (neonatal 2001), 104.

intensive care unit), premature babies have a

much greater chance of surviving. John Lantos relates the “narrative
of progress” that has been at the heart of neonatal medicine. He notes
that it became the fastest growing field in pediatrics and that this
success story is linked to its financial gains. The infant mortality rate
between “1900 and 1960 .. . dropped from 122 per 1,000 to 26 per
1,000.”14 Those statistics were cut in half again as the life expectancy in
the NICU increased. Technologies developed for decreasing infancy
mortality came with a price, however. New moral dilemmas were
raised as the technologies advanced. The courts and lawyers could
barely keep up with the new dilemmas. An unprecedented interest
in “medicine, neonatology, and the moral dilemmas of medicine and
technology” came to the fore.15
Each human being has a story, a narrative that is connected in,
with, and under the stories of others. As folks hear the stories of Lou¬
ise Brown and Nancy Cruzan, they cant help but wonder about their
own story and what it means in the larger scheme of the cosmos. These
larger cultural narratives of technology, human persons, medicine,
384 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

and religion sharpen the questions about the world and what it means
to be a part of it. To pursue these questions is to pursue a quest for
meaning. Does human personhood begin at conception? At birth? If
sperm are donated, the eggs donated, and a surrogate mother utilized,
who are the parents? What does it mean to be part of a family? If
someone is in a persistent vegetative state, does our culture consider
him or her to be a person? Is it ethical to “do everything” in order to
keep someone alive? Beginnings lead to questions about endings.
Many people imagine a fairly clear, simple, straightforward story
about what it means to be human. Lines between death and life, science
and religion, humans and nature have appeared to be separate, distinct,
and clear. The stories of beginnings and endings of life at the end of
the twentieth century, however, tell about a much more complex web
of technology and nature, humans and machines, religion and science,
nature and culture, than could have been imagined. The boundaries
that were once unambiguous (or so some hoped) were revealed as fuzzy
and permeable. What folks once thought was “true” and “right” shifted
faster than they could manage. Religious people, caught in these cul¬
tural stories of life and death, floundered to make sense of their faiths
convictions and the concomitant realities of technology and science.
And so the stories of who humans thought they were no longer had
simple plots and characters, with clear beginnings and endings. Mak¬
ing sense of the human story is more akin to jumping into the middle
of the story, where beginnings and endings collapse into one another
and the characters move through the plot as if it were an endless maze.
Beginnings and endings will cross one another, move through each
other, and define where the path leads. While many Christians will
desire clarity and direction, the ambiguous and messy may be the only
guide. Ordinary Christians are caught in the midst of dramas of life and
death for which no clear directions are given, no map is provided. How
they find their way is of utmost importance to the ongoing story.
Birth and death: no other events in human lives are more mys¬
terious or have created more spiritual and ethical questions. Medical
science and biotechnological advances have drastically altered the way
life and death are defined and understood, and about what it means to
be human in relationship to technology. Human beings are tethered
in, with, and under technologies that shape and define human nature.
 Life and Death in Middle America Pederson 385

People become who they are

amid and in these new tech¬
nologies, and not apart from
them. Lives are extended by
respirators, premature babies
are kept alive in the NICU,
computers take vital signs, and
pacemakers are implanted.
And in the middle of it, people
try to make sense of it all, ask¬
ing questions along the way.
And these questions are at the
heart of what it means to be
human, to be related to God and creation. Fig. 16.2. Premature baby in
neonatal intensive care unit.
How do Christians struggle with these spiritual questions in Photo © Ken Glaser/Corbis.
light of recent discoveries in medical science and biotechnology? To Used by permission.

answer this question requires telling yet more stories, reflecting on

the questions, and thinking about the quest for meaning. If people
truly become who they are in, with, and under technology, then cop¬
ing with technology and their relationship to it is a spiritual struggle.
Human beings can no longer afford to think that they are separate
from nature, the apex of God’s creation. New boundaries and new
stories define the human person. The ways people struggle with these
difficult questions are shaped by larger cultural narratives that include,
of course, religious and scientific stories.

TECHNOLOGY, THE MARKET, AND MEDICAL SCIENCE

Nothing can reveal more about human beings than what they see
and hear on their televisions at night as they flip through the chan¬
nels. Commercials advertise that medicine and doctors can provide
some sort of eschatological salvation; they can save people from their
humanness. Local hospitals advertise the wonders of medicine and the
advances of technology for problems ranging from infertility to heart
disease. The business of health care delivery reaches out to consumers
with messages of hope and promise of relief from their illnesses. And
386 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

consumers expect these results, even demand

Religion and Technology them. As soon as a new technological advance is
I will pose two questions for reflec¬ promoted or a new pill advertised, American con¬
tion and then elaborate one theological sumers expect that it is their right to have access
interpretation of technology. The two to it. People have faced not only the wonders of
questions: Where does religion take technology, but also its limitations and horrors.
place? What shapes does religion take? Television seems to ignore these realities except
My answer: If we speak about technol¬ through occasional sound bites on the evening
ogy at its deepest levels, we are at the
news. The future seems up for grabs; what once
same time speaking about its religious
seemed safe and secure is not the case anymore
dimension, even if we do not use con¬
(or never really ever has been). Ironically, while
ventional religious terminology.
some of the technological innovations have led to
—Philip Hefner, Technology and
“bigger and better” ways of living, the public has
Human Becoming, Theology and the
Sciences (Minneapolis:
become more restless, more uneasy than ever. The
Fortress Press, 2003), 73. world changes so fast that folks can’t keep up. And
they expect a quick fix for this spiritual malaise.
The questions about technology and medicine
are just a tip of this age of anxiety. The late twentieth century shared
both the hopeful and the fearful attitudes that the Enlightenment
twilight produced. As members of a do-it-yourself, future-looking
culture, Americans expect that the limits of the human condition can
be overcome or escaped. Much like their cultural expectations about
life and death, their religious expectations reflect the culture. People
don’t really want to think seriously about death, illness, and human
frailties. Many people shop for church the way they do for food—they
want something to provide immediate comfort. Ironically, the price
they ultimately pay for such comfort foods and quick fixes is denial of
and postponement of their pain. The questions will always be there;
they don’t go away.

DIFFERENT CHRISTIAN RESPONSES TO TOUGH QUESTIONS

The many faces of the Christian tradition approach these spiritual
questions in different ways. Some avoid addressing the questions
directly and simply quote from the Bible. Others leave the meaning
up to each individual believer. Some denominations write position
 Life and Death in Middle America Pederson 387

papers, while others have authorities issue statements. These state¬

ments of the various denominations illustrate approaches that are
often so divisive that ordinary people are bombarded with confusing
messages about what the Christian response should be. Sometimes the
messages come in sermons, or are played on tape to a congregation at
the request of a bishop, or are studied in groups. How religious tradi¬
tions wrestle with these difficult and often ambiguous questions will
reveal much about the stories of the relationship between religion and
science at the end of the twentieth century.
Some Christian denominations, usually Protestant, elevate the
written text of the Bible above all other authorities. Other bodies, like
the Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches, also include the role
of tradition, experience, and reason. And most parishioners struggle
with questions of authority, despite their denominational affiliation.
No wonder people have a difficult time working how to discern a
path through these difficult questions when the official guides are
so diverse. This is not necessarily a hazard, however. The diversity
among Christians can produce angst and fear, or it can be seized as
an opportunity to expand the question for truth through incorporat¬
ing many voices. Whether the ultimate authority is the written text, a
papal writing, or one’s individual inner voice, the way people come to
spiritual discernment mirrors not only their religious background but
also their cultural values.
The following three traditions span some of the variety of Chris¬
tian responses to ethical and spiritual dilemmas about the beginnings
of life. Their written documents embody the cultural and religious
themes that shape the way religion was practiced in the late twentieth
century. They are a part of the story, but not its totality by any means.
They reflect a diversity of their respective Enlightenment and Refor¬
mation inheritances. The three positions are: The ELCA statement on
abortion, the UCC statement on reproductive rights, and the Roman
Catholic 1987 document “Respect for Human Life.”16 The state¬
ments were created in different ways, indicating how the direction of
laypeoples perspectives are gathered, evaluated, and formulated. Of
course it must be said that within each denomination great variety
exists. Often, liberal Roman Catholics will have more in common with
liberal Lutherans than conservative Roman Catholics. This variation
388 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

in part exists because of the culture wars that occur in the political and
religious arenas. In a time in which warfare seems to pervade these
difficult issues, rhetoric escalates, and political lines are drawn.
All three denominations seek counsel from a number of sources,
including scientists, ethicists, and theologians, to formulate their state¬
ments. How the statements are considered authoritative and what role
they play in parishioners’ lives vary among the denominations. For
example, the ELCA’s statement came after much deliberation with lay-
people, holding regional hearings in various synods, and taking a final
vote of the national body of laypeople and clergy. The process is some¬
what similar in the General Synods of the UCC. Both statements leave
more room for moral ambiguity, and while they give counsel, the final
decision about an abortion is left to the individual. The Congregation
for the Doctrine of the Faith issued the 1987 statement “Respect for
Human Life” from the magisterium and reflects previous authoritative
teachings and traditions. No votes were taken by laypeople. The state¬
ment is much less ambiguous than the Protestant ones and does not
leave the same room for individual decisions. This examination of how
the statements are constructed by denominational bodies provides
insights into the web of narratives that shape laity when they confront
difficult moral issues like abortion or end-of-life decisions.
All three statements begin with a theological affirmation that
life is a gift from God and is good. Not inconsequentially, all three
acknowledge that the issues raised by technology at the beginning of
life are morally freighted and require careful discernment. The ELCA
document on abortion acknowledges the differences that people have
and the life circumstances that shape these differences. This was an
important statement to include because the ambiguous conclusions of
the position paper itself created differing receptions among laypeople.
Some Lutherans would like to have seen a more definitive statement
that clearly condemned abortion. For others, the strength of the
Lutheran tradition is precisely in its ability to relate the texts of its
tradition (scripture and the confessions) to the particular contempo¬
rary context. Lutherans have understood themselves to be a part of a
church always undergoing reformation. This is exactly what the ELCA
document on abortion reiterates—the context and text as an interac¬
tive process of interpretation.
 Life and Death in Middle America Pederson 389

Both the UCC and ELCA acknowledge that women often face
difficult and even dire circumstances that shape their individual
reproductive needs and decisions. Such circumstances might include
a forced pregnancy, poverty, violence, and abuse. The ELCA states that
neither the pregnant woman nor the “developing life in the womb”
has a right. In fact, the language of rights is not helpful because this
implies an absolute for either the woman or the fetus.17 To quote at
length from the statement on abortion of the ELCA:

The language used in discussing abortion should ignore neither

the value of unborn life nor the value of the woman and her other
relationships. It should neither obscure the moral seriousness
of the decision faced by the woman nor hide the moral value
of the newly conceived life. Nor is it helpful to use the language
of “rights” in absolute ways that imply that no other significant
moral claims intrude. A developing life in the womb does not
have an absolute right to be born, nor does a pregnant woman
have an absolute right to terminate a pregnancy. The concern for
both the life of the woman and the developing life in her womb
expresses a common commitment to life. This requires that we
move beyond the usual “pro-life” versus “pro-choice” language in
discussing abortion.18

These different views on abortion and reproduction are related to

both denominations’ understandings of authority, which are very dif¬
ferent from that of the Roman Catholic Church. Theology is after all
a practice.
The UCC statement indicates that it has affirmed and “reaffirmed
since 1971 that access to safe and legal abortion is consistent with
a woman’s right to follow the dictates of her own faith and beliefs
in determining when and if she should have children, and has sup¬
ported comprehensive sexuality education as one measure to prevent
unwanted or unplanned pregnancies.”19 The UCC’s statements are
clearer than the ELCA’s about affirming that women have access to
safe and legal abortions. The UCC takes very seriously the context of
the moral dilemma and makes this a priority in the statement. The
decision clearly resides within the woman’s autonomous prerogative.
390 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

Finally, the Roman Catholic statement on “Respect for Human

Life,” claims that from the moment of fertilization a human being is
created and that this life is sacred. The focus is clearly on the sacred
nature of human life and that the proper context for creating human
life should be within marriage. Abortion and other reproductive
issues are considered from these priorities. The statement reminds
people that society often commodifies and commercializes human life
and that this is problematic from a Christian perspective that declares
life as sacred, created by God. The Roman Catholic document also
cautions that the biological and reproductive sciences have powers
that may have reached beyond what should and could be done. The
language of individual rights should not be the first concern, but
instead the goal of the common good comes first—preserving and
honoring the sacred nature of all life. The Roman Catholic Church
continues to and constantly “reaffirms the moral condemnation of
any kind of procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and is
unchangeable.”20
In many ways, the issues and dilemmas around the end of life
are similar in the three perspectives. And laypeople are caught some¬
where between their own operating theology and the statements
and beliefs of their religious denomination and tradition. For some,
personal beliefs are consonant with denominational beliefs, while for
many others, personal beliefs are at odds with those of the religious
body. Then the beliefs become more complicated because life is more
complex. Stories are also complicated because neither the sciences
nor religious traditions are monolithic. And the relationship between
them is multilayered.

SPECIFIC STORIES
One way to see what is happening on a college campus is to read what’s
posted on the walls. A few years ago many of us couldn’t miss a poster
on the wall sponsored by two campus groups asking people to pray
for a woman who was going to have an abortion (selective embryo
reduction). Her name was not given, but the details of her situation
were apparent. The poster claimed that the woman’s husband had
 Life and Death in Middle America | Pederson 391

asked for the prayers from groups and was pleading with his wife not
to have the abortion. Furthermore, the poster claimed that if she went
through with the abortion she would be murdering her own child.
Even though the poster’s information was supposedly anonymous,
the gossip began to spread around campus, creating a heated debate
on campus about abortion. Were the campus bulletin boards the right
place to display such information? Was this woman’s right to privacy
being violated? Somewhere in South Dakota a woman’s life and her
relationship with her physician and her husband became fodder for
public warfare. Other campus groups and religious communities felt
that they needed to respond. And since the rhetoric had escalated, the
exchanges between both sides was not helpful for anyone in creating
a safe place for discussion.
This example, while localized, symbolizes the incredible emo¬
tional tension that an issue like abortion can elicit. People line up to
take figurative and real shots at each other. Soon, protective gear is
needed! Battlegrounds include school classrooms, church sanctuaries,
medical clinics where abortions are performed, political campaign
advertisements, and personal friendships. In all cases, rhetoric heats
up, and both sides want to claim their way is the only way, and even
God’s way. Both claim to have the god’s-eye view of life. If one is trying
to discern one’s way through this minefield, battle wounds often seem
the only reward.
In the 1980s and 1990s, both medical sciences and religious tradi¬
tions faced new questions of what it means to be human in light of
such rapid technological and scientific transitions. One way to face
such change is to answer the question in different ways by viewing sci¬
ence and religion as independent spheres that offer different answers.
Religious or theological language is supposedly subjective, answers
the why questions, and belongs in church or in one’s own private life.
Scientific language is public, answers the how questions, and is objec¬
tive. When I have listened to medical faculty give lectures to residents,
I have heard an occasional doctor say that all religious, political, emo¬
tional, and cultural biases should be checked at the door on the part
of the physician or health care worker. Their hope is that some kind
of objectivity and distance can be maintained from the patient so that
the treatment is not compromised.
392 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

The church is hardly exempt from such a worldview about the rela¬
tionship between religion and science. The realm of faith is reduced
to a privatized world in which the purpose of Christianity is for the
individual alone. While an occasional adult forum might address
complicated issues around the end of life, how often does one hear a
thoughtful sermon or prayers or other liturgical forms address these
difficult moments in ones life—and actually addresses them in such a
way that the worshiper doesn’t feel “told” what to believe? Catecheti¬
cal materials don’t adequately prepare young adults to face questions
about life and death, at least not in ways that prepare them for the pain
and difficulty of such questions. Seminary curricula have just begun to
address the questions involving what it means to be human in an age
of technology and science in meaningful and thoughtful ways.
When the reproductive embryologist comes to church, she leaves
her scientific hat at the door. And the same happens at work with her
religious beliefs. College students are educated this way. A student
once remarked to me, as he saw me wandering through the Gilbert
Science Center, that science is in this building or hallway and religion
is in the other building or hallway and rarely shall they meet. I was
notably out of place. And while it may seem convenient to separate
religion and science, it is also rarely the case in matters of life and
death that it is possible or desirable to do so.
What happens if the reproductive endocrinologist or palliative
care physician is facing a difficult issue about the morality of her or
his work? In South Dakota, multiple attempts have been made to
either severely restrict or eliminate abortions. What if at the local
level a legislative bill that eliminates all abortions and that defines
human personhood from the moment of conception is passed and
becomes law? Legislative bills have been introduced that would force
artificial nutrition and hydration in cases in which it is not wanted by
a patient. In many of these cases, religious views of the human person
are at work in the legislature’s production of the bills. Many of these
legislative changes could have a profound effect on the work of scien¬
tists, the practice of physicians, and the health care of patients. All of
a sudden the personal becomes public. Physicians have to decide how
to work in a context that doesn’t easily separate public from private,
religion from science. Consequently, some physicians and scientists
 Life and Death in Middle America I Pederson 393

have begun to lobby legislatures and inform the public about the con¬
sequences of such legislation. Here the relationship between religion
and science intersects in profoundly personal and political ways.
In South Dakota (and other states whose primary economic base
is agricultural), human reproductive issues cannot be separated from
other sciences like veterinary medicine. What ends up at the in vitro
lab in the city probably began in the barns of the university veterinary
school. At Augustana College in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, biology
students under the tutelage of Dr. Maureen Diggins do research on
body fat and fertility, by using the lethal yellow mouse mutant.21 Their
research is used by the faculty at the University of South Dakota San¬
ford School of Medicine for work on reproductive medicine. At the
medical school, other faculty do research on in vitro fertilization and
other biomedical issues related to reproduction. The relationship is
fertile and has yielded multiple articles and grants.
On the other side of Sioux Falls is Hematech, which “is develop¬
ing a novel system for production of human poly¬
clonal antibodies.”22 Transgenic cows are “created” Bioethical Complexities
or reproduced to treat human diseases. “Human Bearing all this in mind, I find myself
polyclonal antibodies can be used for a wide vari¬ supporting stem cell research. This
ety of therapeutic applications, including treat¬ does not by any means indicate that
ment of antibiotic-resistant infections, biodefense, I am persuaded by ethical arguments
immune deficiencies, cancer and various auto¬ that depend on distinctions between

immune diseases.”23 Boundaries between human totipotent and pluripotent cells. In

animals and nonhuman animals collapse and fact, I am not finally persuaded at all.
I find myself in an interim state, strug¬
implode to regenerate life—to create transgenic
gling to weigh the complex factors.
species. Humans sacrifice the lives of mice and
My theological excursis into dignity
cows in order to understand and improve their
is illuminating, but it does not make
own species. And yet these incredible and pow¬
answering the central ethical question
erful scientific and biotechnological innovations
clear enough to be decisive. This may
are never linked to the politics of abortion and be disappointing to some readers.
other human reproductive concerns. Abortion of —Ted Peters, quoted in
human embryos and fetuses is only one small layer The Human Embryonic Stem Cell
of a much more complicated relationship between Debate, Suzanne Holland, Karen
human and nonhuman, science and religion. Lebacqz, Laurie Zoloth, eds.

Scientific evidence is utilized by both sides of (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 137.

the debate in South Dakota. The intersection of

394 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

personal and medical opinions gives way to more division. “Deter¬

mining scientific fact on abortion is difficult, medical experts say.
Even within the states medical community, the abortion debate has
been divisive.”24 The South Dakota State Medical Association issued
a policy statement declaring that the matter of abortion is personal
in nature and that the SDSMA should not attempt to change per¬
sonal beliefs. Whether an abortion should be performed is also a
matter of personal conscience, but the patient’s health should not be
compromised.25
Dr. Maria Bell, a Sioux Falls gynecologist and member of the fac¬
ulty of the University of South Dakota Sanford School of Medicine,
has found herself in the crossfire of the debate around science, medi¬
cal practice, and ethics. She said that “she wasn’t looking to become
involved in politics but has felt compelled to become a public face
in what might become the most bitter and divisive battle in South
Dakota election history.”26 In hotly debated concern about abortion,
Bell spoke publicly about her pro-choice position. Speaking out on
this divisive issue can result in hate mail, death threats, and compro¬
mise in one’s medical practice. “Bell said she’s received many harassing
e-mails—and a few that she considered to be threatening to herself
and her family. She said she removed her children from Catholic
school after they were taunted by other students. But like her counter¬
parts on the opposite side of the debate, Bell is not deterred.”27 Maria
Bell has found herself in the midst of a situation in which she cannot
be expert in all of its dimensions—legal, spiritual, ethical, and scien¬
tific. In the ongoing story of abortion politics in South Dakota, the
relationship between medical science and religious beliefs unfolds in
people’s lives that change the very way they practice both their science
and their religion. This issue becomes more complicated in a state like
South Dakota, where boundaries of geography, landscape, economics,
and race further divide a small population.
In other stories told to me, some nurses, pharmacists, and phy¬
sicians who firmly believe that personhood is established from the
moment of conception find it very difficult to work with patients
who demand health care procedures or protocols that go against this
view. What about the nurse who works on the floor in a local hospital
where an embryo reduction might take place? Should the nurse be
 Life and Death in Middle America Pederson 395

required to participate in the procedure against his religious beliefs,

against his will? Some hospitals allow nurses not to participate in the
procedure for reasons of conscience. But think about this a bit further.
I have participated in lively discussions with medical residents and
pre-medicine undergraduates about how physicians should handle
situations in which they might have to go against their conscience. For
example, many physicians have refused to participate in or administer
lethal injections to prisoners on death row. The situation can become
more complicated when individual patients come to their physicians
looking for help.
What happens when a young woman comes to her physician
seeking a prescription for birth control and the physicians religious
beliefs are opposed to prescribing birth control? Should the physician
refuse the patients request, or refer the patient to another doctor? If,
for example, the physician believes that birth control is a form of abor¬
tion, then is the physician complicit in what he or she calls sin? What
happens to the young woman? Or on another occasion, the physician
might refer the patient, and then she receives the prescription only to
find that the local pharmacist refuses to fill it for reasons of conscience.
How do health care providers provide adequate health care without
either being paternalistic or compromising the patient’s care?
In a geographically isolated area like South Dakota, health care pro¬
viders have unique responsibilities to their patients. For example, when
pharmacists with certain religious views object to filling an order that
is prescribed by the physician, women living in rurally isolated areas
may not have access to referral to other pharmacies. This pits the needs
of the patient against the views of the pharmacist. Some states include
a “conscience clause” that exempts pharmacists from filling certain
prescriptions because of their religious or philosophical beliefs. If the
pharmacist believes that contraceptives destroy unborn children, even
the fertilized eggs not yet implanted in the uterus, then the pharma¬
cist need not fill the order requested by the patient and the physician.
With increasing political attempts backed by religious groups to limit
or prohibit abortion, medical and health care providers will find them¬
selves in ongoing religious struggles as well as medical ones. Clearly the
conservative religious climate in South Dakota (a partnership between
Roman Catholicism and Protestant fundamentalist and evangelical
396 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

denominations like Southern Baptists) shapes the way technology and

access to reproductive health care is being delivered.
Educating health care professionals about reproductive tech¬
nologies and reproductive health care issues becomes increasingly
complex in a culture like South Dakota. South Dakota was the first
state to require pregnant women who abuse alcohol or drugs to be
rehabilitated. Women can be incarcerated for using alcohol when
pregnant, and using drugs during pregnancy is defined as child abuse.
While not directly religious issues, the implications for the status of
both the women and the fetus have religious implications for some
health care providers. Given the more conservative religious climate
and geographical isolation of our region, physicians, for example,
have difficulty in getting medical training about abortion procedures.
In a state where only one community offers abortion services, many
women must travel up to 350 miles for such services and then must
return to their own communities for follow-up care. Will the fol¬
low up care be adequate for the patient if the physician has refused
to learn about abortion or if he or she refuses to help the patient on
moral grounds? If medical students are opposed to learning about
contraception and/or abortion procedures, whose burden is it to offer
an exemption from the requirement? Should the pressure be on the
student to “opt out” and possibly face criticism from faculty and other
students? Or in other cases, some students have felt criticism and
ostracism from faculty and other students for requesting such educa¬
tion. In their stories, religious and cultural issues have shaped how
their education is delivered.
To complicate the situation even more in South Dakota, access
to good reproductive health care can seem a luxury for the poor,
and particularly for American Indian women. Many Native women
writing about reproductive health care and freedom argue that the
Christian religion had a deleterious affect on Native women and their
needs. “With the imposition of colonization and Christianity, foreign
values, belief systems, and practices were forced upon our communi¬
ties. Within those foreign systems, decisions pertaining to reproduc¬
tive health were made by the Church with little regard to individual
rights. Traditionally, reproductive health issues were decisions made by
the individuals, and was not pushed into the political arena for close
 Life and Death in Middle America | Pederson 39 7

examination. The core of decision-making for Indigenous women is

between her and the Great Spirit.”28 From forced sterilizations to poli¬
cies of incarceration for pregnant women using alcohol, Native women
must overcome many barriers to trust that adequate health care can
be provided by a predominantly white culture. Steven Charleston, a
citizen of the Choctaw Nation and president of the Episcopal Divin¬
ity School, underlines the point that racism formed the relationship
between Christian missionaries and Native communities. “Exploi¬
tation, even genocide, was permissible under the cover of a racist
mentality that allowed Europeans, including European Christians, to
believe that they were racially superior to all others with whom they
came into contact.. .. American colonizers could hang hundreds of
‘Indians’ because ‘Indians’ were only savages, not real people.”29 When
American Indians were classified as savages, as not fully human, poli¬
cies could be justified that allowed horrific atrocities like genocide.
Such cultural and religious arrogance is still a problem in areas
like South Dakota. Charleston claims that, when it comes to mission¬
ary outreach, “transformation is the goal, not conversion.”30 Ironically,
the same goal might be applied to the exchange between Native and
white medical practices. The institutions of religion and medicine
still suffer from the problem of racism. Is there openness on the part
of Western medicine to learn from and be transformed by Native
medicine? The same question must be asked of the respective religious
traditions. The transformation can begin at the level of the personal,
with sharing stories.
At various points in teaching undergraduates, I have offered
courses on beginnings and endings of life and learned how incredibly
painful, personal, and political these issues are. From a course entitled
“Reproduction and the Family” to one on end-of-life issues entitled
“Living Until We Die, Dying until We Live,” I have watched students
leave their academic fa$ade and enter personal and often painful
discussions about loved ones, family members, and friends.31 For
example, as part of his final presentation, a student named John told
the story about his grandmother’s dying by using powerful black-and-
white pictures of her life and those around her. While a local physician
would have diagnosed her as a relatively healthy elderly woman, she
felt she was dying. John’s pictures told the story of her life: most of
398 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

her friends had died, the small rural South Dakota town in which she
lived was losing population, she still lived alone in her small house,
and her local church was losing members. Her self-diagnosis was one
in which she experienced profound loss—all that was familiar to her
was dying, and so was she.
I have listened to students talk about how painful it was to watch
a grandparent be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and slowly
become a different person from the one they knew. Jane, a senior in
the class, spoke about how she watched her parents struggle with the
care of her grandmother. The family coped with loss at several levels:
.. of the person they once knew, of a hope that didn’t seem to exist, and
Fig. 16.3. This elderly . r r
woman in an intensive care of the family that had changed drastically.
unit appears lost among the por q^j- students a close friend might be diagnosed with can-
machines that are monitoring ° °
and, most likely, sustaining cer, and all of a sudden their world changes. Priorities shift, and the
her life functions. Photo© friendship can no longer remain the same. For some students who
permission. marry and decide to have a family, infertility becomes a problem. I
met several times with a young woman
to sort out the spiritual dilemmas about
the couple’s discovery of infertility. Sarah
and Rich tried over and over to conceive
only to find themselves at their local
reproductive endocrinologist’s office
facing decisions about in vitro fertil¬
ization. All of a sudden in these situa¬
tions, what once seemed distant, even
abstract, becomes intense, personal, and
urgent. Sarah wondered if God was
punishing them, and Rich struggled to
even find a way to talk about the situ¬
ation. They learned that beginnings and
endings are not discrete simple moments
but are processes moving through an
entire life story.
One of the more amazing discus¬
sions I had with a student centered on
the theme of “playing God.” Inevitably,
when discussions turn to technology
 Life and Death in Middle America | Pederson 399

and what it means to be human, Christians in turn ask what it means

to be divine. The concern seems to be that when technology runs
amok, humans have exceeded their capacities to benefit others and
have begun to trust in technology to do more than God intended.
Christians often assume that playing God implies that God is an
intervening, interfering, all-powerful know-it-all. “Divine” is the exact
opposite of “human.” How ironic when Erin, a junior premedical
student in my class, suggested that the discussion might be framed
differently. She said, “If indeed God becomes human, and takes on
the suffering of humans for humans, isn’t that what it means to play’
[God] or be divine? What if playing God was fulfilling what it means
to be human—that is, caring for the neighbor?” Then using technol¬
ogy to heal and help would be part of God’s intention for humankind.
Erin’s words changed the way the class thought about what it means
to be divine and human.
Students in this course on theology and medicine often pointed
out that God calls people to use what God has given them and to use it
for the benefit of others. Humans, according to Christian tradition, are
created in the image of God—they are to imagine who they are from
within the reflection of divine creativity. What better way to become
and be a human person than to employ technology for the benefit of
humanity and the created order. Christians begin to think differently
about who they are and what their vocation is.
Theology emerges through the stories that are told, stories about
what it means to be a human person created in the image of God.
These stories from South Dakota are not unique; they represent the
broader conversations that occur among ordinary Christians. And as
people think about the beginnings and endings of their own lives, they
can’t help but wonder where they have come from and what they are
here for. Such a quest requires that Christians reflect on their place
in the universe, in all of its interlocking pieces and relationships. The
larger narratives about what it means to be human don’t begin or end
in South Dakota! When Christians listen and learn from the particu¬
lars of their own stories they discover deeper and more meaningful
connections that matter to the lives of all people. Christians learn
about what it means to be a human person when they are willing to
share in the stories of all people. As a people born of the Incarnate
400 TWENTIETH-CENTURY GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY

One, Christians are part of the story of flesh and blood, broken and
shared. Living and dying is what humans were created to do. And
there is no simple beginning or ending, but each day is a beginning
and ending, a dying and rising rooted in the hope of God, a baptismal
faith of death and resurrection. Christians are learning that beginnings
and endings are not discrete, simple moments but are processes moving
through an entire life story, one that was begun in baptism and ends in
resurrection.

FOR FURTHER READING

Barbour, Ian G. When Science Meets Religion: Enemies, Strangers, or Partners? San Fran¬
cisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2000.
Colby, William H. Long Goodbye: The Deaths of Nancy Cruzan. Carlsbad, Calif.: Hay
House, 2002.
Haraway, Donna. The Haraway Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Hefner, Philip. Technology and Human Becoming. Theology and the Sciences. Minne¬
apolis: Fortress Press, 2003.
Holland, Suzanne, Karen Lebacqz, and Laurie Zoloth, eds. The Human Embryonic Stem
Cell Debate. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002.
Lantos, John. The Lazarus Case: Life-and-Death Issues in Neonatal Intensive Care. Balti¬
more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
Maguire, Daniel, ed. Sacred Rights: The Case for Contraception and Abortion in World
Religions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Roach, Mary. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. New York: Norton, 2003.
Waters Brent, and Ronald Cole-Turner, eds. God and the Embryo: Religious Voices on
Stem Cells and Cloning. Georgetown: Georgetown University Press, 2003.
Williams, Terry Tempest. Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. New York:
Vintage, 1992.
NOTES

Introduction. Multiplicity and Ambiguity

1. Conversation with Cesar del Rio, November 1, 2006.
2. “The Key to the Churches in the Diocese of Visby” (Church of Sweden,
2001).
3. Jim Forest, The Resurrection of the Church in Albania: Voices of Orthodox Chris¬
tians (Geneva: WCC Publications, 2002), 37.
4. Masao Takenaka, God Is Rice: Asian Culture and Christian Faith (Geneva:
WCC Publications, 1986), 6-7. The quote from Watanabe comes from Masao Takenaka,
“Sadao Watanabe—The Man and His Work,” in Biblical Prints by Sadao Watanabe,
Sadao Watanabe and Masao Takenaka (Tokyo: Shinkyo Shuppansha [Protestant Pub¬
lishing Co.], 1986).
5. Joseph Healey and Donald Sybertz, Towards an African Narrative Theology
(Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1996), 123-24. The authors are Maryknoll missionaries.
6. New St. Joseph’s Peoples Prayer Book (New York: Catholic Book, 1980, 1993),
442.
7. One of the most recent and complete is volume 9 of the Cambridge History of
Christianity Series, World Christianities c. 1914-c. 2000, ed. Hugh McLeod (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006).
8. In Icons of American Protestantism: The Art of Warner Sallman, 1892-1968
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), the editor, David Morgan, cites an estimate
by Sallman’s publisher, Kriebel and Bates, Inc., that Head of Christ has been reproduced
more than 500 million times and has been distributed around the world (210nl).
9. Kwok Pui-lan has creative things to say about this process in “Discovering the
Bible in the Non-Biblical World,” in Lift Every Voice: Constructing Christian Theologies
from the Underside, ed. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite and Mary Potter Engel, revised and
expanded edition (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1998), 276-88.
10. Estimates of the numbers of Christians in the world and in various parts of the
world tend to be just that—estimates. One of the most frequently cited sources is David
B. Barrett, George T. Kurian, and Todd M. Johnson, eds., World Christian Encyclopedia,
402 NOTES

2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 1:4, 12. Scholars like Philip Jenkins in
The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002) advise caution in using statistics about how many Christians there are in
the world and where they are, and points to discrepancies in various sources. In “Count¬
ing Christians in China: A Cautionary Report,” International Bulletin of Missionary
Research 27, no. 1 (January 2003): 6-10, Tony Lambert relates that “the last two decades
have seen no resolution to the problem posed by the yawning gulf between statistics
issued by the Chinese government or state-approved church representatives, and those
figures published by some Christian agencies elsewhere” (6). One place to keep track of
numbers of Christians and the percentage of the population they comprise in a given
continent or country is on the website of the World Christian Database: http://www
.worldchristiandatabase.org/wcd/esweb.asp.
11. Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, The Future of Religion: Seculariza¬
tion, Revival and Cult Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 2.
12. Kenneth R. Ross, ‘“Blessed Reflex’: Mission as God’s Spiral of Renewal,” Inter¬
national Bulletin of Missionary Research 27, no. 4 (October 2003): 162-68. Another
instructive article related to this phenomenon is by William B. Frazier, “Nine Break¬
throughs in Catholic Missiology, 1965-2000,” International Bulletin of Missionary
Research 25, no. 1 (January 2001): 9-14. Among some of the changes he chronicles are
“from unrefined to unmistakable articulation of the universal availability of salvation”
and “from exclusion to inclusion of the local church in full missionary responsibility.”
13. Roberta Bondi, Memories of God: Theological Reflections on a Life (Nashville:
Abingdon Press, 1995).
14. Nancy Ammerman, Pillars of Faith: American Congregations and Their Part¬
ners (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 1.
15. Dana L. Robert, “World Christianity as a Womens Movement,” International
Bulletin of Missionary Research 30, no. 4 (October 2006): 180-88. In her article Robert
acknowledges the premise of Ann Braude’s well-known essay, “American Religious
History Is Women’s History,” in Retelling U.S. Religious History, ed. Thomas A. Tweed
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 87-107. Braude argues that American
religious history would look very different if women were the focus.
16. See Nancy Eiseland, The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Dis¬
ability (Nashville: Abingdon, 1994).
17. Mark Noll, History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 428.
18. David Chidester, Christianity: A Global History (San Francisco: HarperSan-
Francisco, 2000), 8.
19. William A. Dyrness, Learning about Theology from the Third World (Grand
Rapids: Zondervan, 1990), 84-85.
20. In his lecture “The Ecclesiology of Vatican II,” given in 2001 to open a pasto¬
ral congress in Italy dedicated to a rereading of the documents of the Second Vatican
Council, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, gave a sophisticated
interpretation of the church as the Body of Christ as “a living organism,” and of the con¬
cept of the church as “the people of God” as an ecumenical bridge. He lamented, how¬
ever, that “commentators very soon completely handed the term ‘people’ in the concept
 Notes 403

‘People of God’ to a general political interpretation.” “Marxist” or “popular sovereignty”

were two of the negative examples given. The lecture can be found at http://www.ewtn
.com/library/curia/cdfeccv2.htm.
21. Charles Taylor, for example, in A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2007), argues for an understanding of secularity that is not simply the “subtrac¬
tion” of belief in God from society but rather that belief in God is “understood to be one
option among others and frequently not the easiest to embrace” (3).
22. Margaret O’Gara, The Ecumenical Gift Exchange (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgi¬
cal, 1998).
23. Lamin Saneh, Whose Religion Is Christianity? The Gospel beyond the West
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003).
24. Joy Harjo, “Perhaps the World Ends Here,” in The Woman Who Fell From the
Sky (New York: Norton, 1994), 68.

Chapter One. Filipino Popular Christianity

1. Salvador Martinez, “Jesus Christ and Popular Piety in the Philippines,” in
Asian Faces of Jesus, ed. R. S. Sugirtharajah (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1993), 247.
2. Orlando Espin, “Tradition and Popular Religion: An Understanding of the
Sensus Fidelium,” in Frontiers of Hispanic Theology in the United States, ed. Allan
Figueroa Deck (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1992), 62.
3. Ibid., 63.
4. David Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission
(Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1991), 302-3.
5. Martinez, “Jesus Christ in Popular Piety in the Philippines,” 248. For various
accounts of the origin of Santo Nino, see Manolo Vano, Christianity, Folk Religion, and
Revolution (Quezon City, Philippines: Giraffe Books, 2002).
6. See Fernando Segovia, “Aliens in the Promised Land: The Manifest Destiny of
U.S. Hispanic Theology,” in Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz and Fernando Segovia, eds., Hispanic/
Latino Theology: Challenges and Promise (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 16.
7. John Leddy Phelan, The Hispanization of the Philippines (Madison: University
of Wisconsin, 1959), viii.
8. Aloysius Pieris, Asian Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1988),
69-86.
9. Steffi San Buenaventura, “Filipino Religion at Home and Abroad: Historical
Roots and Immigrant Transformations,” in Pyong Gap Min and Jung Ha Kim, eds.,
Religions in Asian America: Building Faith Communities (Walnut Creek, Calif.: Altamira,
2002), 147.
10. James Alexander Robertson, “Catholicism in the Philippines,” Catholic His¬
torical Review 3 (1918): 382-83, cited in ibid., 148.
11. Buenaventura, “Filipino Religion.” See also Steffi San Buenaventura, “Filipino
Folk Spirituality and Immigration: From Mutual Aid to Religion,” in New Spiritual
Homes: Religion and Asian Americans, ed. David K. Yoo (Hawaii: University of Hawaii
Press, 1999), 52-86.
404 NOTES

12. Douglas Elwood and Patricia Magdamo, Christ in Philippine Context (Quezon
City, Philippines: New Day, 1971), 18. See also F. Landa Jocano, Folk Christianity: A Pre¬
liminary Study of Conversion and Patterning of Christian Experience in the Philippines,
Monograph Series No. 1 (Quezon City: Trinity Research Institute, 1981).
13. Jocano, Folk Christianity.
14. Buenaventura, “Filipino Religion,” 149.
15. Benigno Beltran, The Christology of the Inarticulate: An Inquiry into the
Filipino Understanding of Jesus the Christ (Manila, Philippines: Divine Word, 1987), 97.
16. Martinez, “Jesus Christ in Popular Piety in the Philippines,” 249.
17. Jimmy Belita, “Filipino Popular Catholicism: The Struggle against Cultural
Gods,” Dialogue and Alliance 5, no. 4 (Winter 1991/1992): 53.
18. What C. Gilbert Romero says about Hispanic popular Christianity finds reso¬
nance with Filipinos. See his essay “Tradition and Symbol as Biblical Keys for a United
States Hispanic Theology,” in Deck, Frontiers of Hispanic Theology in the United States, 47.
19. Thomas Andres, Understanding Filipino Values: A Management Approach
(Quezon City, Philippines: New Day, 1981), 66.
20. Jocano, Folk Christianity, 5.
21. Andres, Understanding Filipino Values, 161.
22. Beltran, Christology of the Inarticulate, 123.
23. Ibid., 115.
24. This happened in Laguna de Bay, Philippines. The students who were with me
when this insightful moment happened were Karen Aitkens, Sally Mann, and Daniel
Narr. See Eleazar S. Fernandez, Reimagining the Human: Theological Anthropology in
Response to Systemic Evil (St. Louis: Chalice, 2004), 195.
25. This is a revised telling of Juan Flavier’s story in Doctor to the Barrios (Quezon
City, Philippines: New Day, 1970), 28-29.
26. Ligaya San Francisco, a Filipina student at United Theological Seminary of the
Twin Cities (2005-2006), was a helpful resource for some of the Filipino sayings.
27. Melanio Aoanan, “Teolohiya ng Bituka at Pagkain: Tungo sa Teolohiyang
Pumipiglas,” Explorations in Theology: Journal of the Union Theological Seminary 1,
no. 1 (November 1996): 23-44.
28. Beltran, The Christology of the Inarticulate, 247.
29. Jose M. de Mesa, In Solidarity with the Culture: Studies in Theological Re¬
rooting, Maryhill Studies 4 (Quezon City, Philippines: Maryhill School of Theology,
1987), 147-77; Jose M. de Mesa, And God Said, “Bahala Nal”: The Theme of Providence
in the Lowland Filipino Context (Quezon City, Philippines: Jose M. de Mesa, 1979),
81-161; see also Theresa Dagdag, “Emerging Theology in the Philippines Today,” Kali-
nangan 3. no. 3a (September 1983): 7.
30. Joseph Frary, “The Philippines: February 1986 in Retrospect,” Asian Journal
of Theology 1, no. 2 (1987); Allan J. Delotavo, “A Reflection on the Images of Christ in
Filipino Culture,” Asian Journal of Theology, 3, no. 2 (1989): 524-31.
31. Reynaldo Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines,
1840-1910 (Quezon City, Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1979).
32. Bishop Teordoro Bacani, Mary and the Filipino (Makati, Philippines: St. Paul
Publications, 1985), 86-88.
 Notes 405

33. People’s Participation for Total Human Liberation (Pasay City, Philippines: Alay
Kapwa, 1982), 36.
34. Ed Gerlock, “The Living and the Dead,” in Signs of Hope: Stories of Hope in the
Philippines (Quezon City, Philippines: Claretian, 1990), 75.
35. Beltran, The Christology of the Inarticulate, 196.
36. Ibid., 241.

Chapter Two. Rural Southern Black Women in the United States

1. Interview with Victoria Way DeLee, July 4, 1988, Ridgeville, South Carolina.
2. Fannie Lou Hamer, “Fannie Lou Hamer Speaks Out,” Essence 1, no. 6 (October
1971): 53.
3. For example, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that black farmers
were less than 14 percent of farm owners in 1925 and less than 12 percent in 1945. But
among African American farm workers more than 80 percent in 1925 and more than 75
percent in 1945 related to farms other than as full owners. See Bruce J. Reynolds, Black
Farmers in America, 1865 to 2000: The Pursuit of Independent Farming and the Role of
Cooperatives, RBS Research Report 194 (Washington, D.C.: United States Department
of Agriculture, 2002, 2003).
4. Rosetta E. Ross, Witnessing and Testifying: Black Women, Religion, and Civil
Rights (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 119.
5. Ibid., 98.
6. J. H. O’Dell, “Life in Mississippi: An Interview with Fannie Lou Hamer,”
Freedomways 5 (1965): 232; ibid., 92.
7. See, for example, discussions in Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter:
The Impact of Black Women on Race and Class in America (New York: William Mor¬
row, 1984); Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation
South, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 1999); Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black
Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 (New York: Norton, 2000).
8. Ross, Witnessing, 121.
9. From Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of
Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992). They write
that there were “2805 victims of lynch mobs killed between 1882 and 1930 in ten south¬
ern states. Although mobs murdered almost 300 white men and women, the vast major¬
ity... of lynch victims were African-American. Of these black victims, 94 percent died
in the hands of white lynch mobs. The scale of this carnage means that, on the average,
a black man, woman, or child was murdered nearly once a week, every week, between
1882 and 1930 by a hate-driven white mob” (ix).
10. O’Dell, “Life in Mississippi,” 233-34.
11. Ross, Witnessing, 120.
12. O’Dell, “Life in Mississippi,” 233-34; interview with DeLee; interview with
Thomas H. Ross, Dorchester, South Carolina, March 11, 1994; ibid.
13. Interview with DeLee; Calvin Trillin, “U.S. Journal: Dorchester County, S.C.—
Victoria DeLee in Her Own Words,” New Yorker 47 (March 27,1971): 86; Ross, Witness¬
ing, 121.
406 NOTES

14. Phyl Garland, “Builders of a New South,” Ebony 21 (August 1966): 29.
15. Ross, Witnessing, 119.
16. O’Dell, “Life in Mississippi,” 232; Garland, “Builders of a New South,” 28.
17. Ross, Witnessing, 131.
18. Howell Raines, My Soul Is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remem¬
bered (New York: Penguin, 1983), 252; Fannie Lou Hamer, “To Praise Our Bridges,” in
Mississippi Writers: Reflections of Childhood and Youth, Volume 2: Nonfiction, ed. Doro¬
thy Abbott (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 1986), 325.
19. Ross, Witnessing, 104.
20. Hamer, “Fannie Lou Hamer,” 53, 54; O’Dell, “Life in Mississippi,” 231-32,
emphasis added.
21. Rayford Whittingham Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford Hayes
to Woodrow Wilson (New York: Da Capo, 1954).
22. Laughlin MacDonald, “An Aristocracy of Voters: The Disfranchisement of
Blacks in South Carolina,” South Carolina Law Review 37 (Summer 1986): 570-71.
23. Hamer, “To Praise Our Bridges,” 324; Garland, “Builders of a New South,” 29;
Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Urbana: University
oflllinois, 1999), 18.
24. Interview with DeLee; Trillin, “Victoria DeLee,” 86.
25. See Peter J. Paris, The Social Teaching of the Black Churches (Philadelphia: For¬
tress Press, 1985), and Latta R. Thomas, Biblical Faith and the Black American (Philadel¬
phia: Judson, 1976).
26. See Riggins Earl Jr., Dark Symbols, Obscure Signs: God, Self, and Community in
the Slave Mind (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003); Eugene D. Genovese,
Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage, 1976).
27. Charles Marsh, God’s Long Summer (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1999).
28. Ross, Witnessing, 118-19.
29. Ibid., 119.
30. See, for example, William Jones, Is God a White Racist? A Preamble to Black
Theology (Boston: Beacon, 1997), and Anthony Pinn, Why Lord? Suffering and Evil in
Black Theology (New York: Continuum, 1995).
31. Ross, Witnessing, 97.
32. Ibid., 111.
33. Interview with DeLee.
34. Ross, Witnessing, 135.
35. Barbara S. Williams, “Victoria DeLee Denies Charges Lodged by Police,”
Charleston News and Courier, May 8, 1971, Bl; see also ibid., 134.
36. Ross, Witnessing, 134.
37. Raines, My Soul Is Rested, 252, and Hamer, “To Praise Our Bridges,” 325.
38. Fannie Lou Hamer, foreword, in Tracy Sugarman, Stranger at the Gates: A
Summer in Mississippi (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967).
39. Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-1965 (New York:
Dutton, 1993), 470.
40. William Julius Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing
American Institutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 144.
 Notes 407

Chapter Three. African Women Theologians

1. A term that covers several ethnic groups in Ghana whose languages are dia¬
lects of one language. Akan society is matrilineal.
2. Mercy Amba Oduyoye, Daughters of Anowa: African Women and Patriarchy
(Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1995), 12-13.
3. Oduyoye, Daughters ofAnowa, 1-2.
4. Mercy Amba Oduyoye and Musimbi Kanyoro, Talitha, Qumi! Proceedings
of the Convocation of African Women Theologians, Trinity College, Legon-Accra,
September 24-October 2, 1989 (Ibadan, Nigeria: Daystar, 1990), 4. These goals have
been repeated at several local meetings and continue to guide the Circle, as it seeks to
remain relevant to the changing context. Cf. Rosemary N. Edet and Meg A. Umeagu-
dosu. Life, Women and Culture, Proceedings of the National Conference of the Circle
of Concerned African Women Theologians (Lagos, Nigeria: African Heritage Research
and Publications, 1990), 2.
5. Isabel Apawo Phiri, “Doing Theology in Community: The Case of African
Women Theologians in the 1990s,” Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 99 (Novem¬
ber 1997): 69-70.
6. In addition to Njoroge from Kenya, the Cartigny group included Elizabeth
Amoah (Ghana), Brigalia Bam (South Africa), Toyin Isaacs (Nigeria), Nzeba Kalenda
(Zaire—Democratic Republic of the Congo), Charity Majizah (South Africa), Daisy Obi
(Nigeria), Mercy Amba Oduyoye (Ghana, and Amal Tawfik (Egypt).
7. Musimbi Kanyoro, Introducing Feminist Cultural Hermeneutics: An African
Perspective (New York: Sheffield Academic, 2002), 28-29.
8. Virginia Fabella, Beyond Bonding: A Third World Womens Theological Journey
(Manila: EATWOT and Institute of Women’s Studies, 1993), 49.
9. I personally have roots in the World Student Christian Federation, the World
Council of Churches, the Oxford Institute of Wesleyan Studies, and the Ecumenical
Association of Third World Theologians. I studied dogmatics at Cambridge University
after earning a degree in the study of religion from the University of Ghana, Legon.
At that time, 1959-1963, it was a program of London University’s bachelor of divinity
degree. Before going to Legon, I had been a schoolteacher with a Cambridge school cer¬
tificate taken through Achimota School, followed by two years of pedagogy. After Tripos
Part III Cambridge, I was again a schoolteacher, then an ecumenical youth worker, first
for the World Council of Churches and then for All Africa Conference of Churches
(AACC). Then I was once more a schoolteacher, this time in a boys’ school, before I was
invited to apply for a position in the Religious Studies Department at the University of
Ibadan, Nigeria.
10. This lecture was published in two parts in African Notes 18, nos. 1 and 2 (1979).
African Notes is the bulletin of the Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan,
Nigeria.
11. Oduyoye and Kanyoro, Talitha, Qumi! 19.
12. Walter Davis subsequently went on to the faculty of San Francisco Theological
Seminary and became key to its doctor of ministry program in feminist theology. Three
members of the Circle have graduated from this program.
13. Fabella, Beyond Bonding, 46.
408 NOTES

14. Oduyoye and Kanyoro, Talitha, Qumi!

15. Kanyoro, Feminist Cultural Hermeneutics, 28.
16. Ibid., 29.
17. Edet and Umeagudosu, Life, Women and Culture, 5-6.
18. Mercy Amba Oduyoye, “The Asante Woman: Socialization through Proverbs,”
African Notes 8, nos. 1 and 2 (1979).
19. Fabella, Beyond Bonding, ix.
20. Kanyoro, Feminist Cultural Hermeneutics, 27.
21. Ibid.
22. Edet and Umeagudosu, Life, Women and Culture, 1.
23. Kanyoro, Feminist Cultural Hermeneutics, 29.

Chapter Four. Hispanic Women:

Being Church in the U.S.A.
1. People from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and Central and South Ameri¬
can nations who live in the U.S.A. are referred to as Hispanics or Latinos. Here I will use
“Hispanics” since this is the term used more often in the Catholic Church and among
those of us from Caribbean nations.
2. National parishes are Catholic parishes that serve particular ethnic communi¬
ties instead of serving a geographic area as territorial parishes do. National parishes have
existed in the U.S.A. since the mid-nineteenth century, when they were established to
meet the needs of immigrants who did not speak the language of the majority popula¬
tion. For a history of national parishes and chapels in the archdiocese of New York, see
Jaime R. Vidal, “Citizens Yet Strangers: The Puerto Rican Experience,” in Jay P. Dolan
and Jaime R. Vidal, eds., Puerto Rican and Cuban Catholics in the U.S., 1900-1965, Notre
Dame History of Hispanic Catholics in the U.S. 2 (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1994), 11-143.
3. Ibid, 25.
4. Ana Maria Diaz Stevens, Oxcart Catholicism on Fifth Avenue: The Impact of the
Puerto Rican Migration upon the Diocese of New York (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1993), 128.
5. Many Hispanics consider arrogant the appropriation by the U.S.A. of the name
“United States,” the same being true of the way “America” is used often to refer to the
U.S.A. There are other countries that have “United States” as part of their official name,
and the U.S.A. is not the only country in America. Many Hispanics when talking in
English use “U.S.A.” also because it can be said as a word that we find easy to pronounce,
« »
usa.
6. Diaz Stevens, Oxcart Catholicism, 128.
7. This is why Ivan Illich, then a monsignor in the Catholic Church, insisted that
the priests had to know not only the people’s language but also their history and that the
priests had to understand the challenges of intercultural communication. Ibid, 140.
8. I live in Washington Heights, in New York City, an area with the largest con¬
centration of people from the Dominican Republic except for the capital of that Carib¬
bean country. Different candidates running for president in the Dominican Republic
 Notes 409

campaign in my neighborhood (not personally), and many of my neighbors vote in the

presidential election of their country. In the very important 2007 plebiscite of Venezuela
in which Hugo Chavez attempt to change the constitution of that country to continue to
be president beyond the two terms allowed, Venezuelans in the U.S.A. voted. These are
just two examples of how Hispanics in the U.S.A. are transnationals.
9. For a fascinating account of the history of unknown or ignored Hispanics in
the U.S.A. see Juan Gonzalez, Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America (New
York: Viking, 2000).
10. Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of
People and Money (New York: New Press, 1998).
11. David Rieff, “Nuevo Catholics,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, December
24, 2006.
12. Ibid. Also at http://www.nccbuscc.org/hispanicaffairs/demo.html and http://
www.catholic.com/thisrock/2005/0509fea3.asp. Accessed January 14, 2008.
13. I am here disagreeing with the conclusion drawn by Rieff in “Nuevo
Catholics.”
14. For a fuller discussion of this perspective, see Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, En La
Lucha—In the Struggle: Elaborating a Mujerista Theology, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress
Press, 2004), chapter 5.
15. Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz and Yolanda Tarango, Hispanic Women: Prophetic Voice
in the Church/Mujer hispana—voz profetica en la iglesia (San Francisco: Harper 8c Row,
1988; repr.: Scranton, Pa.: University of Scranton Press, 2006), 52.
16. Ibid, 53.
17. Ibid.
18. I was part of the group meeting with the bishops and personally witnessed
what happened.
19. Arturo Perez, Consuelo Covarrubias, and Edward Foley, eds., Asi Es: Historias
de Espiritualidad Hispana (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical, 1994), 67. This quote is from
a Latina who is a nun.
20. Isasi-Diaz and Tarango, Hispanic Women, 14-19.
21. Ibid, 32-38.
22. Rafael de Andres, lyrics, Juan A. Espinosa, music, “Dolorosa,” in Flory Canto,
2nd ed. (Portland, Ore.: OCP Publications, 2001), H389.
23. This is in line with the concept of theosis prevalent in Eastern Christianity. See
Mark O’Keefe, O.S.B., Becoming Good, Becoming Holy (New York: Paulist, 1995).
24. Robert D. McFadden and Colin Moynihan, “Protest Vigil Begins at Church Set
to Be Closed by Archdiocese,” New York Times, February 12, 2007.
25. James Barron, Jennifer Lee, and Rebecca Cathcart, “After Vigil to Protest
Church Closing, Six Women Are Arrested,” New York Times, February 13, 2007.
26. Colin Moynihan, “Locked Doors Don’t Stop Prayers at East Harlem Church,”
New York Times, February 19, 2007.
27. James Barron, “A Church Protest Ends Quickly, but the Anger Is Likely to
Endure,” New York Times, February 14, 2007.
28. Private conversation of author with Carmen Villegas.
29. “Dogmatic Constitution on the Church,” in Lumen Gentium, chapter 2.
410 NOTES

Chapter Five. Orthodoxy under Communism

1. There is no instrumental music in the Orthodox Church. Instead there are
sometimes as many as three choirs located in various places in the sanctuary singing
harmonious responses to the priestly chants or hymns.
2. Eastern Orthodox Churches are those churches that have accepted dogmatic
Christological formulas of the Council of Chalcedon (451 c.E.) on the two natures of
Christ. Among them are the Greek, Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Albanian, Georgian,
Ukrainian, the Orthodox Church of America, and related churches. Oriental churches
are sometimes called non-Chalcedonian as they accept only the decisions of the first four
ecumenical councils and initially were divided into Monophysite and Nestorian Churches.
Among the Oriental Christian Churches are the Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopian, Syriac,
Indian, Malankara Jacobite Syriac Orthodox, and the Assyrian Church of the East.
3. Paul Mojzes, Religious Liberty in Eastern Europe and the USSR (Boulder: East
European Monographs, 1992), 66-67.
4. Ibid., 125. This lasted until the collapse of Communism in Albania in 1990.
5. In all of Russia there was for a long time only the Journal of the Moscow Patri¬
archate, mostly a bulletin of events and announcements, and the annual of the Saint
Petersburg Theological Academy, which published a few arcane theological articles.
It was almost the same in Bulgaria, and only a little better in the Serbian Orthodox
Church. None were published in Albania.

Chapter Six. Evangelicalism in North America

1. Examples include David Edwin Harrell, Oral Roberts: An American Life
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); James Hunter, Culture Wars: The
Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991); and Michael Cromartie, ed.,
A Public Faith: Evangelicals and Civic Engagement (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield,
2003).
2. See, as examples, R. Stephen Warner, New Wine in Old Wineskins: Evangelicals
and Liberals in a Small-Town Church (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988);
James M. Ault, Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church (New York:
Knopf, 2004); and Randall Balmer, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the
Evangelical Subculture in America, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
3. Examples include Robert Wuthnow, Acts of Compassion: Caring for Others and
Helping Ourselves (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Christian Smith, Chris¬
tian America? What Evangelicals Really Want (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2000); Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith, Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion
and the Problem of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); and
Nancy Tatom Ammerman, Pillars of Faith: American Congregations and Their Partners
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
4. Leigh Eric Schmidt, “Mixed Blessings: Christianization and Secularization,”
Reviews in American History 26 (December 1998): 640.
5. The references are to Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture (New York:
Basic Books, 1973); and Robert A. Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Com¬
munity in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).
 Notes 411

6. This summary is taken from David W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern

Britain (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 2-17.
7. Angus Reid Group, “God and Society in North America: A Survey of Religion,
Politics and Social Involvement in Canada and the United States.” For permission to use
this poll, we are grateful to Angus Reid and Andrew Grenville.
8. Rick Ostrander, The Life of Prayer in a World of Science: Protestants, Prayer,
and American Culture, 1870-1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); and
George A. Rawlyk, Is Jesus Your Personal Saviour? In Search of Canadian Evangelicalism
in the 1990s (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996).
9. William Patton, Prayer and Its Remarkable Answers, cited in Ostrander, Life of
Prayer, 51.
10. Rawlyk, Canadian Evangelicalism, 103, 127-28.
11. Ibid., 129-31.
12. Marsha Witten, All Is Forgiven: The Secular Message in American Protestantism
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
13. For a report on the worship wars in contemporary American churches, see
John D. Witvliet, Worship Seeking Understanding: Windows into Christian Practice
(Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003).
14. Larry Eskridge, “Slain by the Music,” Christian Century, March 7, 2006, 18,
which draws on Larry Eskridge, “God’s Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in
America, 1966-1977” (Ph.D. diss., Stirling University, Scotland, 2005). Eskridge’s dis¬
sertation forms the basis for much that follows.
15. For orientation to the history sketched here, see Stephen A. Marini, Sacred
Song in America: Religion, Music, and Popular Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2003); David W. Stowe, How Sweet the Sound: Music in the Spiritual Lives of
Americans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004); and Richard J. Mouw and
Mark A. Noll, Wonderful Words of Life: Hymns in American Protestant History and
Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004).
16. See especially S. Sizer (= Tamar Frankiel), Gospel Hymns and Social Religion
in the Rhetoric of Nineteenth-Century Revivalism, American Civilization (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1978); and for a revision of her arguments, Richard J. Mouw,
‘“Some Poor Sailor, Tempest Tossed’: Nautical Rescue Themes in Evangelical Hymnody,”
in Mouw and Noll, eds., Wonderful Words of Life, 234-50.
17. For illuminating exposition on Crossley and Hunter, as well as their prede¬
cessors and successors, see Kevin B. Kee, Revivalists: Marketing the Gospel in English
Canada, 1884-1957 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006).
18. For full treatment of her important achievement, see Edith Waldvogel Blum-
hofer, Her Heart Can See: The Life and Hymns of Fanny Crosby (Grand Rapids: Eerd¬
mans, 2005).
19. See especially Edward H. McKinley, Marching to Glory: The History of the
Salvation Army in the United States, 1880-1992, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
1995).
20. For background, see James R. Goff, Close Harmony: A History of Southern
Gospel (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
21. Thomas Bergler, ‘“I Found My Thrill’: The Youth for Christ Movement and
412 NOTES

American Congregational Singing, 1940-1970,” in Mouw and Noll, Wonderful Words

of Life, 123-49.
22. See especially David Edwin Harrell, All Things Are Possible: The Healing and
Charismatic Revival in Modern America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1975).
23. Eskridge, “Slain by the Music,” 19.
24. A fine book dealing mostly with the Calvary Chapel and Vineyard movement
is Donald E. Miller’s Reinventing American Protestantism: Christianity in the New Mil¬
lennium (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
25. See http://www.willowcreek.org.
26. See G. A. Pritchard, Willow Creek Seeker Services: Evaluating a New Way of
Doing Church (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1996).
27. For different approaches, see Marva J. Dawn, Reaching Out without Dumbing
Down: A Theology of Worship for the Turn-of-the-Century Culture (Grand Rapids: Eerd-
mans, 1986); and D. G. Hart, Deconstructing Evangelicalism: Conservative Protestantism
in the Age of Billy Graham (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004).
28. This datum is from Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and
Popular Culture in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 246. McDannell’s
volume and the participant-observations of Ethan Sanders are the main sources for this
section.
29. See http://www.mardel.com.
30. McDannell, Material Christianity, 1.
31. See the earlier work by McDannell, The Christian Home in Victorian America,
1840-1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).
32. The key work, with splendid illustrations, is Paul C. Gutjahr, An American
Bible: A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777-1880 (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1999).
33. See David Morgan, Icons of American Protestantism: The Art of Warner Sail-
man (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).
34. Various aspects of that earlier history are treated superbly in R. Laurence
Moore, Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1994); David Paul Nord, Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the
Birth of Mass Media in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Candy
Gunther Brown, The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in
America, 1789-1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
35. Examples include David F. Wells, Losing Our Virtue: Why the Church Must
Recover Its Moral Vision (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998); and Craig M. Gay, Cash
Values: Money and the Erosion of Meaning in Today’s Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
2003).
36. McDannell, Material Christianity, 223; emphasis in original.
37. See especially Tona J. Hangen, Redeeming the Dial: Radio, Religion, and Popu¬
lar Culture in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
38. On this matter, we are following Benton Johnson, “On Dropping the Subject:
Presbyterians and Sabbath Observance in the Twentieth Century,” in Milton J. Coalter,
John M. Mulder, and Louis B. Weeks, eds., The Presbyterian Predicament: Six Perspec-
 Notes 413

fives (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 1990), 90-108; and Paul Laverdure, Sun¬
day in Canada (Yorkton, Sask.: Gravelbooks, 2004).
39. The question has been asked in important historical studies like Harry S.
Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991); Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American
Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); and Douglas Frank, Less Than
Conquerors: How Evangelicals Entered the Twenty-first Century (Grand Rapids: Eerd¬
mans, 1986).

Chapter Seven. Pentecostal Transformation in Latin America

1. David Martin is one of the few scholars who has noticed the importance of the
conversion of Taso Zayas to Pentecostalism in Mintzs text. See David Martin, Tongues
of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell,
1990), 191-97.
2. On Pentecostalism, see the useful essays in Allan H. Anderson and Walter
Hollenweger, eds., Pentecostals after a Century: Global Perspectives on a Movement in
Transition (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1999). Harvey Cox, Fire from Heaven: The
Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Cen¬
tury (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1995), is an informative text in which the former
“secular city” theologian becomes an advocate of the “spiritual city.” For a sociological
analysis of global Pentecostalism, see David Martin, Pentecostalism: The World Their
Parish (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). Martin is another theoretician of secularization now
bewildered by the new Pentecostal religious revival. Stanley M. Burgess, Gary B. McGee,
and Patrick H. Alexander, eds., Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements
(Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988), is a useful reference text.
3. See the splendid study of the cultural consequences of the sugarcane plantation
for the Caribbean by Antonio Benitez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and
the Postmodern Perspective (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992 [1989]). Sidney
Mintz has written an elegant and intelligent text on the development of the sugarcane
plantations in the British Caribbean. Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of
Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin Books, 1986).
4. See Elizabeth Brusco, “The Reformation of Machismo: Ascetism and Masculin¬
ity among Colombian Evangelicals,” in Virginia Garrard-Burnett and David Stoll, eds.,
Rethinking Protestantism in Latin America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993).
5. Tommy Lee Osborn (sometimes spelled Osborne) was a self-appointed Ameri¬
can evangelist who conducted healing crusades through the Caribbean (Jamaica, Puerto
Rico, and Cuba). His book Healing the Sick (Tulsa, Okla.: Harrison House, 1986 [1951])
has sold over one million copies. It contains a short summary and photos of the healing
campaign (February 1950) in which Taso Zayas alleges to be healed (Osborn, Healing
the Sick, 416-21).
6. Sidney W. Mintz, Worker in the Cane: A Puerto Rican Life History (New York:
Norton, 1974 [I960]), 211-12.
7. D. A. Brading, Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition
across Five Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
414 NOTES

8. See Jacques Lafaye, Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexi¬

can National Consciousness, 1531-1813 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).
According to Octavio Paz, the Virgin of Guadalupe has been the main source of the
Mexican sense of nationhood, more influential in its shaping than the official nationalist
myths of the several republican and revolutionary governments of the last two centuries.
Octavio Paz, Sor Juana, or, The Traps of Faith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1988), 478.
9. Miraculous healings have not been restricted to the first wave of Pentecostal
evangelization in Latin America. The phenomenon has also been one of the keys for the
exceptional growth of the Brazilian Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, consid¬
ered by some scholars as a Neo-Pentecostal church that promises social and economic
prosperity and not only spiritual benefits. See Leonildo Silveira Campos, Teatro, Templo
e Mercado: Organizaqao e marketing de um empreendimento neopentecostal (Petropolis:
Editora Vozes, 1997). See the theological conversation about “healing and deliverance”
between the Pentecostal Cheryl Bridge Johns, the Roman Catholic Virgil Elizondo, and
the Reformed feminist Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel in Jurgen Moltmann and Karl-
Josef Kuschel, eds., Pentecostal Movements as an Ecumenical Challenge (Maryknoll, N.Y.:
Orbis, 1996), 45-62.
10. Mintz, Worker in the Cane, 220-21.
11. Ibid., 223.
12. Ibid., 216.
13. Ibid., 241-44.
14. Ibid., 231.
15. It would be interesting to compare the ecstatic experiences of Taso and Eliza¬
beth with that of John, a rather skeptical young man and the protagonist of James Bald¬
wins novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (first published in 1953). Johns possession by the
Holy Spirit takes place in the early ’50s, in a storefront Harlem Pentecostal church with
the significant name, the Temple of the Fire Baptized.
16. Mintz, Worker in the Cane, 217.
17. Ibid., 276.
18. Ibid., 277.
19. Ibid., 225.
20. See Christian Lalive d’Epinay, The Haven of the Masses (London: Lutterworth,
1969); and Paul E. Sigmund, ed. Religious Freedom and Evangelization in Latin America:
The Challenge of Religious Pluralism (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1999).
21. See Raymond Carr, Puerto Rico: A Colonial Experiment (New York: Vintage
Books, 1984); Jose Trias Monge, Puerto Rico: The Trials of the Oldest Colony in the World
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); and Efren Rivera Ramos, The Legal Construc¬
tion of Identity: The Judicial and Social Legacy of American Colonialism in Puerto Rico
(Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2001).
22. Mintz, Worker in the Cane, 276.
23. For the Iberian royal patronage in Latin America, and the debates it engen¬
dered, see William Eugene Shiels, S.J., King and Church: The Rise and Fall of the
Patronato Real (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1961), and Luis N. Rivera-Pagan,
“Formation of a Hispanic American Theology: The Capitulations of Burgos,” in Daniel
 Notes 415

Rodriguez-Diaz and David Cortes-Fuentes, eds., Hidden Stories: Unveiling the History
of the Latino Church (Decatur, Ga.: Asociacion para la Educacion Teologica Hispana,
1994), 67-97. For the history before and after the independence of the Latin American
nations, see Hans-Jiirgen Prien, La historia del cristianismo en America Latina (Sala¬
manca: Ediciones Sigueme, 1985).
24. See Luis N. Rivera-Pagan, “Violence of the Conquistadores and Prophetic Indig¬
nation,” in Kenneth R. Chase and Alan Jacobs, eds., Must Christianity Be Violent? Reflec¬
tions on History, Practice, and Theology (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2003), 37-49,239-43; Luis
N. Rivera-Pagan, “A Prophetic Challenge to the Church: The Last Word of Bartolome de
las Casas,” Princeton Seminary Bulletin 24, no. 2, new series (July 2003): 216-40; and Luis
N. Rivera-Pagan, “Freedom and Servitude: Indigenous Slavery in the Spanish Conquest of
the Caribbean,” in Jalil Sued-Badillo, ed., General History of the Caribbean, vol. 1, Autoch¬
thonous Societies (London: UNESCO and Macmillan, 2003), 316-62.
25. See, for example, the intelligent discussion of the history of the juridical bonds
between the state and the Roman Catholic Church in Argentina by Jose Miguez Bonino,
in his article “Church, State, and Religious Freedom in Argentina,” in Sigmund, Religious
Freedom, 187-203. Samuel Silva Gotay has made an important recent contribution to
the study of the relations between the Roman Catholic Church and the state in Puerto
Rico, first in the nineteenth century, when the island was a colonial possession of Spain,
and then during the first decades of the twentieth century, when it became a territory of
the United States. Samuel Silva Gotay, Catolicismo y politico en Puerto Rico bajo Espaha
y Estados Unidos: Siglos XIXy XX (San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico,
2005). The classic text about the whole region is that of J. Lloyd Mecham, Church and
State in Latin America: A History of Politicoecclesiastical Relations (Chapel Hill: Univer¬
sity of North Carolina Press, 1966).
26. David Stoll, Is Latin America Turning Protestant? The Politics of Evangelical
Growth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
27. For the spread of Pentecostalism in Latin America, see the variety of perspec¬
tives in Benjamin Gutierrez and Dennis Smith, eds., In the Power of the Spirit: The Pen¬
tecostal Challenge to Historic Churches in Latin America (Arkansas City: Asociacion de
Iglesias Presbiterianas y Reformadas en America Latina; Centro Evangelico Latino-
americano de Estudios Pastorales; Presbyterian Church [U.S.A.], Worldwide Ministries
Division, 1996); and Edward L. Cleary and Hannah W. Stewart-Gambino, eds., Power,
Politics, and Pentecostals in Latin America (Boulder: Westview, 1997).
28. See, for example, Michael Dodson, “Pentecostals, Politics, and Public Space in
Latin America,” in Cleary and Stewart-Gambino, Power, 25-40.
29. See Carmelo Alvarez, Pentecostalismo y liberacion (San Jose, Costa Rica: DEI,
1992); Richard Shaull and Waldo Cesar, Pentecostalism and the Future of the Christian
Churches: Promises, Limitations, Challenges (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000); Douglas
Petersen, Not by Might Nor by Power: A Pentecostal Theology of Social Concern in Latin
America (Oxford: Regnum Books, 1996); and Eldin Villafane, The Liberating Spirit:
Toward an Hispanic American Social Ethic (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993).
30. See the doctoral dissertation of the Chilean Pentecostal theologian Juan
Sepulveda, Gospel and Culture in Latin American Protestantism: Toward a New Theologi¬
cal Appreciation of Syncretism (Ph.D. diss., University of Birmingham, 1996).
416 NOTES

31. Andrew Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the
Transmission of Faith (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1996); Lamin Sanneh, Whose Religion Is
Christianity? The Gospel beyond the West (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003); Philip Jen¬
kins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (Oxford: Oxford Univer¬
sity Press, 2002).
32. Bernardo Campos, De la Reforma Protestante a la Pentecostalidad de la Iglesia:
Debate sobre el Pentecostalismo en America Latina (Quito: Ediciones CLAI, 1997).
33. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (New York: Dover,
1959 [1690]), vol. 2, bk. 4, chap. 19, par. 13, 438.
34. A note of gratitude to Susan Richardson, who reviewed the draft of this chap¬
ter, saved the author from many linguistic infelicities, and enabled him to write a more
readable and elegant text. The author also wants to acknowledge the collaboration of
l.ni7. Nascimento, a Brazilian doctoral student at Princeton Theological Seminary, for
the selection of the chapter illustrations.

Chapter Eight. Apocalypticism in the United States

1. Larry Eskridge, “And, the Most Influential American Evangelical of the Last
25 Years Is ...” Evangelical Studies Bulletin (Winter 2001): 3. Eskridge would name Billy
Graham as the most influential American evangelical overall in the twentieth century,
but much of Grahams influence came earlier.
2. Billy Graham, Just As I Am: The Autobiography of Billy Graham (San Francisco:
HarperSanFrancisco, 1997).
3. “Different Groups Follow Harry Potter, Left Behind, and Jabez,” October 22,
2001, Barna Research Online, http://www.barna.org.
4. Ibid.
5. Eugen Weber, Apocalypses: Prophecies, Cults, and Millennial Beliefs through the
Ages (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 2.
6. Christopher Columbus, Memorials of Columbus: A Collection of Authentic
Documents of That Celebrated Navigator, comp. Giovanni Battista Sopotorno (London:
Treuttel and Wurz, Treuttel jun. and Richter, 1823), 224, cited in Jeanne Halgren Kilde,
“How Did Left Behind’s Particular Vision of the End Times Develop? A Historical Look
at Millenarian Thought,” in Bruce David Forbes and Jeanne Halgren Kilde, eds., Rapture,
Revelation, and the End Times: Exploring the Left Behind Series (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2004), 46.
7. “History of Opinions Respecting the Millennium,” American Theological
Review 1 (1859): 655. Much of this discussion of postmillennialism, premillennialism,
and amillennialism is drawn from chapters by Jeanne Halgren Kilde and Stanley J. Grenz
(chapters 2 and 4) in Forbes and Kilde, Rapture.
8. Kilde, “Left Behind’s Particular Vision,” 49-50.
9. Grenz, “When Do Christians Think the End Times Will Happen? A Compara¬
tive Theologies Discussion of the Second Coming,” in Forbes and Kilde, Rapture, 120.
Grenz’s chapter is based upon Stanley J. Grenz, The Millennial Maze: Sorting Out Evan¬
gelical Options (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1992).
10. Hal Lindsey with Carole C. Carlson, The Late Great Planet Earth (Grand Rap¬
ids: Zondervan, 1970). For A Thief in the Night, see Randall Balmer, Mine Eyes Have
 Notes 417

Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1993), chap. 3.
11. Carl Olson, Will Catholics Be Left Behind? A Critique of the Rapture and Today’s
Prophecy Preachers (Fort Collins, Colo.: Ignatius, 2003); Paul Thigpen, The Rapture Trap:
A Catholic Response to “End Times" Fever (West Chester, Pa.: Ascension, 2001); Barbara
Rossing, The Rapture Exposed: The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation (Boulder:
Westview, 2004); Gary DeMar, End Times Fiction: A Biblical Consideration of the Left
Behind Theology (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2001).
12. Paul S. Boyer, “John Darby Meets Saddam Hussein: Foreign Policy and Bible
Prophecy,” Chronicle of Higher Education, February 14, 2003.
13. Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus: Journal of the Ameri¬
can Academy of Arts and Sciences 96, no. 1 (1967): 1-21.
14. John Wiley Nelson, Your God Is Alive and Well and Appearing in Popular Culture
(Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976), 19-21. Several paragraphs in this section on popular
theology are revised and adapted from Bruce David Forbes, “Battling the Dark Side: Star
Wars and Popular Understandings of Evil,” Word & World 19, no. 4 (Fall 1999): 352-56.
15. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York: Meridian, 1956),
30. Also quoted in Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence, The American Monomyth,
(Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1977), xix.
16. Jewett and Lawrence, American Monomyth, xx.
17. Ibid.
18. Nelson, Your God Is Alive, 31-32. Much of Nelsons analysis of the western
genre is based upon John G. Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique (Bowling Green, Ohio:
Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1970).
19. Nelson, Your God Is Alive, 32.
20. Les Daniels, Comix: A History of Comic Books in America (New York: Bonanza
Books, 1971), 11, quoted in John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett, The Myth of the
American Superhero (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 42.
21. See also Bruce David Forbes, “Batman Crucified: Religion and Modern Comic
Book Superheroes,” Media Development 4 (1997): 10-12.
22. Quoted by Les Daniels in DC Comics: Sixty Years of the World’s Favorite Comic
Book Heroes (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), 58. Marston wrote an article about his
involvement with comic books for the American Scholar, a Phi Beta Kappa publication.
23. This summary is slightly revised from Bruce David Forbes, “How Popular Are
the Left Behind Books ... and Why? A Discussion of Popular Culture,” in Forbes and
Kilde, Rapture, 24, and influenced by the writings of Jewett and Lawrence.
24. See Amy Johnson Frykholm, “The Gender Dynamics of the Left Behind
Series,” in Bruce David Forbes and Jeffrey H. Mahan, eds., Religion and Popular Culture
in America, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 270-87.

Chapter Nine. Catholics in China

1. On this issue, see the excellent article by Geoffrey King, “A Schismatic
Church? A Canonical Evaluation,” in Edmond Tang and Jean-Paul Wiest, eds., The
Catholic Church in Modern China: Perspectives (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1993), 80-102.
An explicit decree of excommunication was issued to the vicar general of Nanjing,
418 NOTES

Li Weiguang, for publishing a declaration promoting the Communist interpretation of

the three autonomies and accusing the pope and his nuncio of collusion with the impe¬
rialists. This excommunication, however, took place before Li’s ordination as a bishop
without Rome’s approval.
2. For more on this question, see Kim-Kwong Chan, Towards a Contextual Eccle-
siology: The Catholic Church in the Peoples Republic of China (1979-1983), Its Life and
Theological Implications (Hong Kong: Chinese Church Research Center, 1987), 81-82,
443-48. Chan also points out that leaders of the so-called patriotic church were careful in
their use of expressions. They “usually employed terms like ‘Roman Curia’ and ‘the Vati¬
can’ instead of terms like ‘the Holy See’ or ‘the Apostolic See.’ The former denotes political
status whereas the latter terms signify the religious and ecclesiastical dimension” (79).
3. Pope John Paul II in Manila, 1995.
4. See statement on the website for the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China
in the Republic of Zimbabwe: http://zw.china-embassy.org/eng/xwdt/tl48718.htm.
5. Letter of the Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI to the Bishops, Priests, Con¬
secrated Persons and Lay Faithful of the Catholic Church in the People’s Republic of
China is available on the Vatican site at www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi
/letters/2007/documents/hf_ben_xvi_let_20070527_china.

Chapter Ten. Existential Ritualizing in Postmodern Sweden

1. This quote comes from a pilot study of how medical professionals in Sweden,
especially in psychiatry, are identifying and understanding the kinds of existential
challenges that exist in ordinary people’s lives in contemporary Sweden. Initial men¬
tion of the study and more of the clinical analysis concerning existential function and
dysfunction can be found in Valerie DeMarinis, “Existential Dysfunction as a Public
Mental Health Issue for Post-Modern Sweden: A Cultural Challenge and a Challenge
to Culture,” in Tro pa teatret: Essays om religion og teater, ed. Bent Holm (Copenhagen:
Copenhagen University Press, 2006), 240-41.
2. All of these terms are discussed in Valerie DeMarinis, Pastoral Care, Existen¬
tial Health and Existential Epidemiology: A Swedish Postmodern Case Study (Stockholm:
Verbum, 2003).
3. Ronald Inglehart, “Mapping Global Values,” in Yilmaz Esmer and Thorleif Pet-
tersson, eds., Measuring and Mapping Cultures: 25 Years of Comparative Value Surveys
(Leiden: Brill, 2007), 16.
4. Ibid.
5. Thorleif Pettersson, “Religion in Contemporary Society: Eroded by Human
Well-being, Supported by Cultural Diversity,” in Esmer and Pettersson, Measuring, 146.
6. The following books provide excellent overviews of the Church of Sweden’s
history, its changes at the end of the twentieth century, and its transition period: Soren
Ekstrom, Svenska kyrkan i forandring [The Church of Sweden in Transition] (Stock¬
holm: Verbum, 1999); Anders Backstrom, Svenska kyrkan som valfdrdsaktdr I en global
kultur: En studie av religion och omsorg [The Church of Sweden as a Welfare Actor in a
Global Culture: A Study of Religion and Social Care] (Stockholm, Verbum, 2001).
7. Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics
Worldwide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 75.
 Notes 419

8. See Onver Cetrez, Meaning-Making Variations in Acculturation and Ritualiza-

tion: A Multi-Generational Study ofSuroyo Migrants in Sweden (Uppsala: Uppsala Uni¬
versity Press, 2005).
9. See, for example, Arthur Kleinman, Patients and Healers in the Context of Cul¬
ture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).
10. DeMarinis, Pastoral Care, 126. This young mans situation represents one type
of existential worldview existing in Sweden at the current time. For more information
on existential worldviews in Sweden, see DeMarinis, Pastoral Care, which was part of a
nationally funded research study on changing patterns of religiosity, spirituality, and the
welfare state in Sweden at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
11. A thorough presentation of the Sann Manniska group can be found in the fol¬
lowing theoretically and contextually rich doctoral dissertation in psychology of religion
and ritual studies: Maria Liljas, Ritual Invention: A Play Perspective on Existential Ritual
and Mental Health in Late Modern Sweden (Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, 2005).
12. A thorough presentation of feminist liturgies in Sweden is found in this well-
documented and multidisciplinary doctoral dissertation in church history: Ninna
Edgardh Beckman, Feminism och liturgi: En ecklesiologisk studie [Feminist Liturgy: An
Ecclesiological Study] (Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, 2000). Three related articles
in English by the same author on this topic are “The Theology of Gathering and Sending:
A Challenge from Feminist Liturgy,” International Journal for the Study of the Christian
Church 6, no. 2 (2006): 144-65; “Lady Wisdom as Hostess for the Lord’s Supper: Sofia-
Massor in Stockholm, Sweden,” in Dissident Daughters: Feminist Liturgies in Global
Context, ed. Teresa Berger (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2001); and, “The
Relevance of Gender in Rites of Ordination,” in Rites of Ordination and Commitment in
the Churches of the Nordic Countries: Theology and Terminology, ed. Hans Raun Iversen
(Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen, Museum Tusculanum Press, 2006).
13. An important multigenerational study of this population is found in Cetrez,
Meaning-Making Variations, a doctoral dissertation in psychology of religion, cultural
psychology, and acculturation studies. .
14. See F. Deniz, En minoritets odyssey: Uppratthallande och transformation av
etnisk identitet I forhallande till moderniseringsprocessor: Det assyriska exemplet [An
Odyssey of a Minority: Maintenance and Transformation of Ethnic Identity in Relation
to the Processes of Modernization: The Assyrian Example] (Uppsala: Uppsala Univer¬
sity Press, 1999); ibid.
15. Deniz, En minoritets odyssey.
16. Cetrez, Meaning-Making Variations, 29.
17. Ibid., 30.
18. A. Bredstrom, “Gendered Racism and the Production of Cultural Difference:
Media Representations and Identity Work among ‘Immigrant Youth’ in Contemporary
Sweden,” NORA 11 (2003): 82.
19. Cetrez, Meaning-Making Variations, 311-12.
20. DeMarinis, Pastoral Care, 126.
21. See I. Kickbush, “The Contribution of the World Health Organization to a
New Public Health and Health Promotion,” American Journal of Public Health 93, no.
3 (2003): 383. For a discussion of an application in the Swedish context see DeMarinis,
“Existential Dysfunction.”
420 NOTES

Chapter Eleven. Ordinary Christians and the Holocaust

1. Marlies Flesch-Thebesius, Zu den Aussenseitern gestellt: Die Geschichte der
Gertrud Staewen 1894-1987 (Berlin: Wichern, 2004), 209.
2. Susannah Heschel, “When Jesus Was an Aryan,” in Robert R Ericksen and
Susannah Heschel, eds., Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1999), 70-71.
3. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, enl. ed. (New York: Mac¬
millan Collier Books, 1971), 300; translation revised.
4. Several works that explore this are Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men:
Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCol-
lins, 1992); Robert Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy,
1933-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); and Peter Haas, Morality after
Auschwitz: The Radical Challenge of the Nazi Ethic (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988).
5. Peter Fritsche, Germans into Nazis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1998), 8.
6. See Victoria J. Barnett, Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity during the Holo¬
caust (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1999), esp. chap. 1. For how this was experienced
by German Jews, see Marion Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi
Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
7. Matthew Hockenos, A Church Divided: German Protestants Confront the Nazi
Past (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 187.
8. Works that cover this research include Ericksen and Heschel, Betrayal; Wolf¬
gang Gerlach, And the Witnesses Were Silent: The Confessing Church and the Jews (Lin¬
coln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000); Doris Bergen, Twisted Cross: The German
Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1996); and Kevin Spicer, ed., Anti-Semitism, Christian Ambivalence, and the Holocaust
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).
9. Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge: Belknap, 2003), 13.
10. Cited in Victoria Barnett, For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest against
Hitler (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 32.
11. Ibid., 128.
12. See Bergen, Twisted Cross, esp. chap. 4.
13. An English translation of the Barmen Declaration is in Hockenos, A Church
Divided, 179-81.
14. Barnett, For the Soul of the People, 142.
15. Ibid., 129.
16. For Catholic Church examples, see Michael Phayer, The Catholic Church and
the Holocaust, 1930-1965 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), esp. chap. 7.
For Protestant examples, see Barnett, For the Soul of the People, esp. chaps. 6 and 7.
17. See Barnett, For the Soul of the People, chap. 7; and Flesch-Thebesius, Zu den
Aussenseitern gestellt.
18. See John Conway, “Between Pacifism and Patriotism—A Protestant Dilemma:
the Case of Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze,” in Francis Nicosia and Lawrence Stokes, eds.,
Germans against Nazism: Nonconformity, Opposition and Resistance in the Third Reich
(New York: Berg, 1990), 87-114.
 Notes 421

19. See Ute Gerdes, Okumenische Solidarity mit christlichen und judischen
Verfolgten: Die CIMADE in Vichy-Frankreich, 1940-1944 (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 2005); Klemens von Klemperer, German Resistance against Hitler: The Search
for Allies Abroad (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); and John J. Michalszyk, ed.
Resisters, Rescuers and Refugees: Historical and Ethical Issues (Kansas City: Sheed and
Ward, 1996).
20. Samuel and Pearl Oliner, The Altruistic Personality (New York: Free Press,
1988), 155.
21. Ibid., 249.
22. Carol Rittner, Stephen D. Smith, and Irena Steinfeldt, eds., The Holocaust and
the Christian World (London: Kuperard, 2000), 113.
23. Ibid., 109.
24. Jan Gross, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz (New York: Random
House, 2006).
25. The most famous cases were Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus, and Emanuel
Hirsch. See Robert P. Ericksen, Theologians under Hitler (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1985).
26. The text of the Seelisberg document can be found on the website of the Inter¬
national Council of Christians and Jews, http://www.jcrelations.net/en/?item=983.
27. Two articles on the Seelisberg meeting can be found in the winter 2008 edition
of the online journal Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations, http://escholarship.bc.edu
/scjr/.

Chapter Twelve. Ecumenism of the People

1. From William Temple’s sermon at his enthronement as archbishop, cited in F.
A. Iremonger, William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury: His Life and Letters (London:
Oxford University Press, 1948), 387.
2. Joan Chittister, In Search of Belief {Liguori, Mo.: Liguori/Triumph, 1999), 12.
3. Chilstrom has reported this story to me personally.
4. For comprehensive and succinct information, and for guidance to other lit¬
erature, see Nicholas Lossky, Jose Miguez Bonino, John Pobee, Tom F. Stransky, Geof¬
frey Wainwright, and Pauline Webb, Dictionary of the Ecumenical Movement, 2nd ed.
(Geneva: World Council of Churches, 2003).
5. Robert S. Bilheimer, Breakthrough: The Emergence of the Ecumenical Tradition
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 4.
6. The Reader’s Digest attacks were published in October 1971, August 1982, and
February 1993.
7. Robert S. Bilheimer, quoted (anonymously) in Patrick Henry and Thomas F.
Stransky, C.S.P., God on Our Minds (Philadelphia: Fortress Press; Collegeville, Minn.:
Liturgical, 1982), 21.
8. Quoted in Esther Byle Bruland, Regathering: The Church from “They” to “We”
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 100.
9. Margaret O’Gara, The Ecumenical Gift Exchange (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgi¬
cal, 1998), x.
422 NOTES

10. Ecumenism Among Us: Report of a Cross-Generational Conversation about the

Unity of the Church and the Renewal of Human Community, June 4-8,1994, Saint Johns
University, Collegeville, Minnesota (Collegeville, Minn.: Institute for Ecumenical and
Cultural Research, 1994), 1.3; see also http://www.collegevilleinstitute.org. The report
weaves together things that were said and written by participants, and it is to first-
person statements that reference is here made. The report itself includes permission for
quotation and even reproduction.
11. Patrick Henry, “The Singapore Faith and Order Consultation, November 1986,”
Mid-Stream 26, no. 2 (April 1987): 248-53
12. Ecumenism Among Us, 13.
13. Ibid., 1.2.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., 1.3.
16. Ibid., 2.1
17. Ibid., 2.2.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., 2.4.
20. Ibid., 3.1.
21. Ibid., 3.2
22. Ibid., 3.5.
23. Ibid., 4.5, 4.4.
24. Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry, Faith and Order Paper No. Ill (Geneva:
World Council of Churches, 1982).
25. Lukas Yischer, “The Convergence Texts on Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry:
How Did They Take Shape? What Have They Achieved?” Ecumenical Review 54, no. 4
(October 2002): 431-54, quotation at 434.
26. Ecumenism Among Us, 4.6.
27. Vischer, “Convergence Texts,” 442-43, citing “Louisville Consultation on Bap¬
tism,” Faith and Order paper No. 97, Review and Expositor: A Baptist Theological Journal
72, no. 1 (1980): 6.
28. Vischer, “Convergence Texts,” 445-46.
29. For a more extensive discussion of the significance of Divino afflante spiritu,
see Patrick Henry, New Directions in New Testament Study (Philadelphia: Westminster,
1979), chap. 10, “The Apostolic Book and the Apostolic See,” 225-40.
30. Ecumenism Among Us, 3.3.
31. Henry and Stransky, God on Our Minds, 6.
32. Ecumenism Among Us, 4.2.
33. Ibid., 2.6.
34. Cited in the foreword to Imogene Blatz, O.S.B., and Alard Zimmer, O.S.B.,
Threads from Our Tapestry: Benedictine Women in Central Minnesota (St. Cloud, Minn.:
North Star, 1994), xi.
35. Kathleen Norris, The Cloister Walk (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996), xv.
36. Ecumenism Among Us, 5.3.
37. This section draws on Patrick Henry, “Reconciling Memories: Building an
Ecumenical Future,” Ecumenical Trends, 26, no. 4 (April 1997): 1-8.
 Notes 423

38. Edited by Patricia Klein, Evelyn Bence, Jane Campbell, and David Wimbish
(Grand Rapids: Revell, 2003).
39. Keith F. Nickle and Timothy F. Lull, eds., A Common Calling: The Witness of
Our Reformation Churches in North America Today (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress
Press, 1993), 49-50.
40. Ibid., 54.
41. F. M. Cornford, Microcosmographia Academica: Being a Guide for the Young
Academic Politician (Cambridge: Bowes 8c Bowes, 1908), 15.
42. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doc¬
trine, vol. 1, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600)(Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1971), 1.
43. Ecumenism Among Us, 5.2.
44. Ibid., 1.2.
45. Ibid., 5.2.
46. Ibid., 1.3, 4.4.
47. On “Re-Imagining” see Nancy J. Berneking and Pamela Carter Joern, eds., Re-
Membering and Re-Imagining (Cleveland: Pilgrim, 1995); and Patrick Henry, The Ironic
Christian’s Companion: Finding the Marks of God’s Grace in the World (New York: River-
head Books, 1999), 160-63.
48. Roberta Grimm and Kathleen S. Hurty, “Prayer, Power, and Action: Church
Women United,” in A Tapestry of Justice, Service, and Unity: Local Ecumenism in the
United States, 1950-2000, ed. Arleon L. Kelley (Tacoma, Wash.: National Association
of Ecumenical and Interreligious Staff, 2004), 79, citing Margaret M. Schiffert, “Church
Women United: On the Dynamic Diagonal,” Ecumenical Trends 14, no. 4 (April 1985):
55-57.
49. An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 1.1.7 (New York: Image
Books, 1960 [1845]), 63.
50. This report, like that of Ecumenism Among Us, is available at the Institute’s
website, http://www.collegevilleinstitute.org.
51. Ecumenism Among Us, 2.6, 3.4, 4.5.
52. Henry Chadwick, The Early Church (New York: Penguin Books, 1967), 144.

Chapter Thirteen. Gender and Twentieth-Century Christianity

1. Pauli Murray, Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage (New York:
HarperCollins, 1987), 435.
2. See David Barrett, George Kurian, and Todd M. Johnson, eds., World Christian
Encyclopedia, vol. 1, The World by Countries, Religionists, Churches, Ministries, 2nd ed.
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 4, 682-85; Roger Finke and Rodney Stark,
The Churching of America, 1776-2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy,
2nd ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 23.
3. Figures cited in Wendy Murray Zoba, “A Womans Place,” Christianity Today
44, August 7, 200Q, 4.
4. Jane Addams, “The College Woman and the Family Claim,” Commons 29 (Sep¬
tember 1898): 6.
424 NOTES

5. Anthony Fletcher, “Beyond the Church: Women’s Spiritual Experience at Home

and in the Community, 1600-1900,” in Gender and Christian Religion, ed. R. N. Swanson
(Woodbridge, U.K.: Published for the Ecclesiastical Society by Boydell, 1998), 190.
6. Horace Bushnell, Woman Suffrage: The Reform Against Nature (New York:
Charles Scribner, 1869), 51, 83.
7. “Appeal to the Ladies of the Methodist Episcopal Church,” Heathen Womans
Friend 1 (1869): 1.
8. Dorothy Hodgson, The Church of Women: Gendered Encounters between Maa-
sai and Missionaries (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2005), 180-81, 184.
9. R. W. Battles, “What about Television?” Sunday School Times, November 26,
1955, 942.
10. Estelle B. Freedman, No Turning Back: A History of Feminism and the Future of
Women (New York: Ballantine Books, 2002), 151.
11. Sally Gallagher, Evangelical Identity and Gendered Family Life (New Bruns¬
wick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 134.
12. See Gary L. Ward, “Introductory Essay: A Survey of the Women’s Ordination
Issue,” in The Churches Speak On: Women’s Ordination, ed. J. Gordon Melton (Detroit:
Gale Research, 1991), xvi-xvii.
13. Ranjini Rebera, “Introduction: Difference and Identity,” in Affirming Differ¬
ence, Celebrating Wholeness: A Partnership of Equals, ed. Ranjini Rebera (Hong Kong:
Clear-Cut, 1995), 12.
14. Quoted in Constance F. Parvey, “Third World Women and Men: Effects of
Cultural Change on Interpretation of Scripture,” in John C. B. Webster and Ellen Low
Webster, eds., The Church and Women in the Third World (Philadelphia: Westminster,
1985), 110.
15. Dorothy Ramobide, “Women and Men Building Together the Church in Africa,”
in Virginia Fabella, and Mercy Amba Oduyoye, eds., With Passion and Compassion: Third
World Women Doing Theology: Reflections from the Womens Commission of the Ecumeni¬
cal Association of Third World Theologians (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1988), 15.
16. Lloyda Fanusie, “Sexuality and Women in African Culture,” in Mercy Amba
Oduyoye and Musimbi R. A. Kanyoro, eds., The Will to Arise: Women, Tradition, and the
Church in Africa (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1992), 114.
17. Musimbi R. A. Kanyoro, “Introduction: Background and Genesis,” in In Search
of a Round Table: Gender, Theology, and Church Leadership, ed. Rachel Kanyoro (Geneva:
World Council of Churches, 1997), ix-x.
18. Bruce Lawrence, Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt against the Mod¬
ern Age (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), 2.
19. Elizabeth Brusco, The Reformation of Machismo: Evangelical Conversion and
Gender in Colombia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995).

Chapter Fourteen. Canadian Workers and Social Justice

1. The author wishes to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada for the three-year research grant and one additional summer grant
that provided the extensive primary material that shaped this chapter.
 Notes 425

2. Gerald Friesen, The Canadian Prairies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,

1984), 327-38; Seymour Martin Lipset, Agrarian Socialism (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1971 [1968]), 39-50, 57-94.
3. Alvin Finkel and Margaret Conrad, History of the Canadian Peoples, vol. 2,
1867 to the Present (Toronto: Copp Clark, 1998), 58-60, 72-75, 101-3; Friesen, Cana¬
dian Prairies, 201-3, 218; Lipset, Agrarian Socialism, 39-40; Pierre Berton, The Prom¬
ised Land (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1984), 264, 375-81.
4. Quoted in Alan F. Artibise, Winnipeg: A Social History of Urban Growth,
1874-1914 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1975), 22.
5. Quoted in Kenneth McNaught, A Prophet in Politics: A Biography of J. S.
Woodsworth (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967 [1959]), 56-57.
6. Richard Allen, The Social Passion (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973),
3-34; McClung quoted in Candace Savage, Our Nell (Halifax: Formac, 1979), 81-82.
7. Allen, Social Passion, 35-54.
8. Kenneth McNaught and David J. Bercuson, The Winnipeg Strike: 1919 (Don
Mills, Ont.: Longman Canada, 1974), 44-100; Norman Penner, ed„ Winnipeg 1919
(Toronto: James Lorimer, 1975), 175; Allen, Social Passion, 45-54, 83-103, 159-74; Joan
Sangster, “The Making of a Socialist Feminist,” Atlantis 13, no. 1 (1987): 13-28; Vera Fast,
“The Labor Church in Winnipeg,” in Dennis Butcher, Catherine Macdonald, and Marga¬
ret E. McPherson, eds., Prairie Spirit: Perspectives on the Heritage of the United Church of
Canada in the West (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1985), 233-49.
9. Allen, Social Passion, 54-80, 104-47, 170-73; Richard Allen, “Salem Bland
and the Spirituality of the Social Gospel,” in Butcher, Macdonald, and McPherson,
Prairie Spirit, 217-32.
10. Lipset, Agrarian Socialism, 81, 99-117; Terry Crowley, Agnes MacPhail
(Toronto: James Lorimer, 1990), 24-127.
11. Terence J. Fay, A History of Canadian Catholics (Montreal: McGill-Queens
University Press, 2002), 8-13, 15-19, 26.
12. Susan Mann Trofimenkoff, The Dream of Nation: A Social and Intellectual His¬
tory of Quebec (Toronto: Gage Publishing, 1983), 169-75, 198-99, 218-32; Paul-Andre
Linteau, Rene Durocher, and Jean-Claude Robert, Quebec, a History, 1867-1929, trans.
Robert Chodos (Toronto: James Lorimer, 1983), 489-95, 535-39, 552; Paul-Andre
Linteau, Rene Durocher, Jean-Claude Robert, and Francois Ricard, Quebec since 1930,
trans. Robert Chodos and Ellen Garmaise (Toronto: James Lorimer, 1991), 1-12, 24,
33-38, 145-50.
13. Fay, Canadian Catholics, 206-7, 247-48, 252, 304; Linteau, Quebec since 1930,
62; Jean Hamelin and Nicole Gagnon, Histoire du catholicisme quebecois, vol. 1, 1898-
1940 (Montreal: Boreal, 1984), 227-29, 417-19; Jean Hamelin, Histoire du catholicisme
quebecois, vol. 2, De 1940 a nos jours (Montreal: Boreal, 1984), 187-88, 359-60; Gregory
Baum, The Church in Quebec (Ottawa: Novalis, 1991), 67-89.
14. Oscar Cole-Arnal, “Shaping Young Proletarians into Militant Christians: The
Pioneer Phase of the JOC in France and Quebec,” Journal of Contemporary History 32,
no. 4 (1992): 509-26; Fay, Canadian Catholics, 206, 279; Baum, The Church, 70-71;
Hamelin and Gagnon, 1898-1940, 420-25, 431-32; Hamelin, De 1940, 64, 68, 72-82,
324-28, 359-61, 374-75.
426 NOTES

15. Fay, Canadian Catholics, 224, 249-54, 304; Baum, The Church in Quebec,
31-32; Trofimenkoff, The Dream of a Nation, 197, 228-29, 288-91, 295; Linteau,
1867-1929, 408-15,455-56; Linteau, Quebec Since 1930, 224-26; Hamelin and Gagnon,
1898-1940, 215-19, 285-89; Hamelin, De 1940, 82-102, 158-60, 243-45.
16. Benoit Fortin, “Quand se leve le soleil de justice,” 14-19, in private papers
granted to the author for use in research, translated by the author.
17. By far, most of the material described above came from primary sources in
French used by the author during research in Quebec, but for a brief sampling, note
Hamelin, De 1940, 359-62; Baum, The Church in Quebec, 44-46, 71-89; Oscar Cole-
Arnal, To Set the Captives Free (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1998), 140-41, 146-49,
161-62, 176-78.
18. Baum, The Church in Quebec, 45, 49-65; Cole-Arnal, To Set the Captives Free,
156-58.

Chapter Fifteen. Popular Catholic Sexual Ethics

1. George Deshon, Guide for Young Catholic Women, Especially Those Who Earn
Their Own Living, 5th ed. (New York: Catholic Publication House, 1871), 246. The
thirty-first edition, published in 1897, appears virtually unchanged except for a few eli¬
sions. The last (32nd) edition according to WorldCat is 1899.
2. Gregory K. Popcak, “Exceptional Sex: Your Master Sex,” in The Exceptional
Seven Percent: Nine Secrets of the Worlds Happiest Couples (New York: Kensington,
2000), 194, 195.
3. Without the inspiration and advice of the following people, this chapter would
have been poorer: Mary Bednarowski, Rebecca Davis, Amy Derogatis, R. Marie Griffith,
Karla Jo Grimmett, Richard Kieckhefer, Patricia Beattie Jung, Evyatar Marienberg,
Susan Ross, Julie Hanlon Rubio. Without Meghan Courtney, my research assistant, it
would not have been at all; I only wish I had room to include half of what she found! As
always, my family has graciously borne the burden of construction.
4. Leslie Woodcock Tender, Catholics and Contraception: An American History
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 5-8, 16-20. Periodic continence was not a
popular method of birth control before the 1930s. In the early part of the century the
infertile period was thought to fall at the middle of the menstrual cycle; not until the late
1920s was it discovered that this is the most fertile period.
5. Ibid., 31-38, 20-21.
6. This reticence extended to parish preaching and the confessional; priests who
preached parish missions (the Catholic equivalent of revivals) faced audiences only once
and were more willing to address sexual topics. See Tender, Catholics and Contraception,
23-41.
7. Deshon, Guide for Young Catholic Women, 241-42, 243, 295.
8. Tender, Catholics and Contraception, 20.
9. Madame Cecilia, More Short Spiritual Readings for Mary’s Children (New York:
Benziger Brothers, 1910), 33.
10. Deshon, Guide for Young Catholic Women, 241.
11. Tender, Catholics and Contraception, 23.
 Notes 427

12. Deshon, Guide for Young Catholic Women, 247.

13. Ibid., 245.
14. Cecelia, Spiritual Readings, 31.
15. Tender, Catholics and Contraception, 106-22. For an admittedly rare example of
contemporary opposition to natural family planning, rhythm’s still more precise succes¬
sor, see Michael Dimond, O.S.B., and Peter Dimond, O.S.B., “Natural Family Planning Is
Evil,” http://www.mostholyfamilymonastery.com/Natural_Family_Planning.html.
16. David Lodge, The British Museum Is Falling Down (New York: Penguin, 1981
[1965]).
17. Raoul Plus, S.J., Facing Life: Meditations for Young Women (n.p. [Maryland]:
The Newman Press, 1960), 52.
18. Ibid., 135.
19. Camillo Zamboni, Jesus Speaks to You (Boston: Daughters of St. Paul, 1961).
20. Gerald Kelly, S.J., Modern Youth and Chastity (St. Louis: The Queens Work,
1941), 82.
21. Joseph E. Haley, C.S.C., Accent on Purity: Guide for Sex Education (Chicago:
Fides, 1957), 35-36; editions seem to range from 1948 to 1960.
22. C. Kevin Gillespie, S.J., Psychology and American Catholicism: From Confession
to Therapy? (New York: Crossroad, 2001), 102-3.
23. Alphonse Clemens, Marriage and the Family: An Integrated Approach for
Catholics (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1957), 196-98, 190. Clemens’s source,
R. De Guchteneere, cited multiple sources from the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries who warned that the substances women absorb from semen are essential to
their physical and psychological health; both remained silent on the psychological dan¬
gers this theory implies for celibate women (see R. De Guchteneere, Judgement on Birth
Control [New York: Macmillan, 1931], 155-60).
24. Francois Dantec, Love Is Life: A Catholic Marriage Handbook (Notre Dame,
Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963), 4.
25. Haley, Accent on Purity, 24.
26. Clemens, Marriage and the Family, 199.
27. Ibid., 189.
28. Ibid., 1.
29. Audrey Kelly, A Catholic Parent’s Guide to Sex Education (New York: Haw¬
thorn, 1962).
30. Ibid., 190-98.
31. T. W. Burke, The Gold Ring: God’s Pattern for Perfect Marriage (New York:
David McKay, 1963), 72.
32. Clemens, Marriage and the Family, 189.
33. Herbert Doms, The Meaning of Marriage, trans. George Sayer (New York:
Sheed & Ward, 1939), xix, quoting Linsermann (1878).
34. Clemens, Marriage and the Family, 189-90.
35. Ibid., 185.
36. G. Flamand, “The Scope of Marriage,” in Marriage Is Holy, ed. H. Caffarel, trans.
Bernard Murchland (Notre Dame, Ind.: Fides, 1963 [1957], 21-33, quotation at 25.
37. Burke, Gold Ring, 71-72.
428 NOTES

38. Tentler, Catholics and Contraception, 266.

39. Gregory K. Popcak, For Better.. . Forever! A Catholic Guide to Lifelong Mar¬
riage (Huntington, Ind.: Our Sunday Visitor, 1999), 199.
40. Mary Beth Bonacci, Real Love: Mary Beth Bonacci Answers Your Questions on
Dating, Marriage, and the Real Meaning of Sex (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1996); Christo¬
pher West, Good News about Sex and Marriage: Answers to Your Honest Questions about
Catholic Teaching (Cincinnati: Servant Books, 2000); Gregory K. Popcak, Beyond the
Birds and the Bees (Huntington, Ind.: Our Sunday Visitor, 2001); Gregory K. Popcak,
The Exceptional Seven Percent: Nine Secrets of the World’s Happiest Couples (New York:
Kensington, 2000); Popcak, For Better.
41. Bonacci, Real Love, 26-27.
42. Popcak, For Better, 212, emphasis in original.
43. Ibid., 203.
44. West, Good News, 40.
45. Popcak, For Better, 31.
46. Popcak, Beyond the Birds and the Bees, 24.
47. Bonacci, Real Love, 81, 36.
48. West, Good News, 67.
49. Ibid., 112.
50. Bonacci, Real Love, 147.
51. Ibid., 33.
52. Ibid., 77.
53. Popcak, Beyond the Birds and the Bees, 54.
54. Bonacci, Real Love, 74.
55. West, Good News, 17.
56. Bonacci, Real Love, 38.
57. Ibid., 85.
58. Ibid., 35.
59. Bonacci, Real Love, 126.
60. Popcak, Beyond the Birds and the Bees, 22.
61. West, Good News, 20-21, 60.
62. In Popcak (For Better), the eucharist is a profound (and for him, unacknowl¬
edged homoerotic) experience of orgasmic union with Christ: “Having won his prize,
our salvation, [Jesus] gives himself to us completely, body and blood, soul and divin¬
ity, through the Most Blessed Sacrament. We draw him close. He enters us. His flesh
becomes one with our flesh. His blood courses through our veins. Fearful and eager at
once to be completely vulnerable to him, we fall prey to his all-consuming love. Inspired
by his passion, nourished by his loving embrace, and propelled by the power of his Holy
Spirit alive within us, we enter the world again, refreshed, to do the great work of bring¬
ing new children to him through the waters of baptism” (203).
63. West, Good News, 109, 114.
64. See Susan A. Ross, “Can God Be a Bride?” America 191, no. 13 (November 1,
2004): http://www.americamagazine.org.
65. Bonacci, Real Love, 74-75, 126, 116-17.
66. Popcak, Exceptional, 194-96, 203.
 Notes 429

67. John and Sheila Kippley, The Art of Natural Family Planning, 3rd ed. (Cincin¬
nati: Couple to Couple League, 1984 [repr. 1994]), 9-28.
68. Popcak, Beyond the Birds and the Bees, 142-43.
69. West, Good News, 18.
70. Bonacci, Real Love, 32.
71. L. Patrick Carroll, S.J., “Becoming a Celibate Lover,” in Mary Anne Hud¬
dleston, IHM, ed., Celibate Loving: Encounter in Three Dimensions (New York: Paulist,
1984), 111-18, quotation at 112.
72. Donald Georgen, The Sexual Celibate (New York: Seabury, 1974).
73. William Kraft, “Celibate Genitality,” in Huddleston, Celibate Loving, 69-90,
quotation at 89.
74. Georgen, The Sexual Celibate, 202-3.
75. Lauren F. Winner, Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity (Grand Rapids:
Brazos, 2005).
76. United States Census Bureau American Fact Finder, see http://factfinder
xensus.gov; Donald Kerwin, “Immigration Reform and the Catholic Church,” Migra¬
tion Information Source, May 2006, see http://www.migrationinformation.org/Feature
/display.cfm?id=395; Bruce Murray, “Latino Religion in the U.S.: Demographic Shifts
and Trends,” FACSNET, January 5, 2006, http://www.facsnet.org/issues/faith/espinosa.
php. These figures are based on a population of roughly seventy-five million Catholics
(nearly 25 percent of the U.S. population). American Religious Identity Survey (2001),
the Graduate Center (CUNY), http://www.gc.cuny.edu/faculty/research_briefs/aris
/key_fmdings.htm. The survey queried adults age eighteen and older; the calculation
above assumes that roughly the same percentages hold for children under eighteen.

Chapter Sixteen. Life and Death in Middle America

1. Philip Hefner, Technology and Human Becoming, Theology and the Sciences
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 63.
2. I teach theology at a small liberal arts college in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I’m
also privileged to be part of the Section for Ethics and Humanities at the University of
South Dakota School of Medicine. What I have learned from living at this intersection
of medicine and religion is that the challenges raised by medical science and technology
raise profound questions about what it means to be a human person. These questions
are fundamental to the human story. And people tell stories to make sense of their lives.
The following reflections on these questions about human personhood are told from
local anecdotes and experiences, but I hope that their universal application will become
apparent as this chapter unfolds.
3. This story was shared with me by a health care administrator. The retrieval of
gametes after death has become a controversial issue for both the families of the patients
and health care providers.
4. John D. Lantos, The Lazarus Case: Life-and-Death Issues in Neonatal Intensive
Care (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2001), 98.
5. “For better or worse, decisions at the end of life seem to be made as communal
decisions rather than individual ones, with the patient’s voice among many. The goal
430 NOTES

in these discussions for both doctors and patients seems to be a little different from
the goal initially imagined by lawyers and bioethicists. It is not simply to empower
the dying patient against the doctor. Instead, it is to achieve some semblance of fam¬
ily moral harmony, some course of action that violates neither the values of the dying
patient nor the values of the survivors, who must live with the memory of the action.”
Lantos, The Lazarus Case, 97.
6. See U.S. Census information at http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/46000
.html.
7. See http://www.state.sd.us/factpage.htm.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. http://www.siouxvalley.org; http://www.avera.org.
11. William Colby, Long Goodbye: The Deaths of Nancy Cruzan (Carlsbad, Calif.:
Hay House, 2002), 9.
12. Ibid.
13. Steve Young. “Group’s Goal: Dying Better, “ in “A Time to Die,” Argus Leader,
December 22, 2002.
14. Lantos, The Lazarus Case, 15-17.
15. Ibid., 17.
16. “Respect for Human Life” can be found on the Vatican’s website, http://www
.vatican.va; (the UCC’s statement can be found at http://www.ucc.org/justice/choice;
the ELCA’s statement can be found at http://www.elca.org/dcs.abortion.htm.
17. See http://www.elca.Org/dcs./abortion/html.
18. Ibid.
19. See http://www.ucc.org/justice/choice.
20. See http://www.vatican.va.
21. See http://www.augie.edu/dept/biology/Web/faculty/diggins/diggins.html.
22. See http//www.hematech.com.
23. Ibid.
24. Megan Myers, “Doctors Take Sides on Abortion Ban,” Argus Leader, July 16,
2006.
25. South Dakota State Medical Association Policy Statement, adopted by the
Council of Physicians, June 7, 2006.
26. Myers, “Doctors Take Sides.”
27. Ibid.
28. See http://www.nativeshop.org/pro-choice.html.
29. Steven Charleston, “The Good, the Bad, and the New: The Native American
Missionary Experience,” Dialog 40, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 103.
30. Ibid.
31. All the names of the students have been changed to maintain anonymity.
INDEX

Page numbers in italics indicate images.

abortion, 388-94 ATR. See African Traditional Religion

accountability, 21 attractiveness, 359
Ackerman, Denise, 100 Augustine, 302
activism, 201-3 authenticity, 25-26
Adams, R. B., 76
Addams, Jane, 312 babailan, 40
African Traditional Religion (ATR), Bacani, Teodoro, 54
100 Bainbridge, William Sims, 8-9, 18
African language zones, 92-93 Baker, Ella, 65
agency, 44-45, 102-4 Balmer, Randall, 160
agricultural economy, Southern, 63-65, Bam, Brigalia, 91
69 baptism, 196-98
Allen, Richard, 332, 337 Barna, George, 213
Ammah, Rabiatu, 104 Barnett, Victoria, 26, 275
Ammerman, Nancy, 10 Barth, Karl, 271
anitos, 39-40, 43 Barmen Declaration (1934), 15, 272
anti-Semitism, 26 Bassett, Paul, 301
Aoanan, Melanio, 52 Bathala, 39-40
apocalypticism, 24, 148, 211-30 Baum, Gregory, 347
as American cultural religion, beadwork, 96
221-23 Beckman, Ninna Edgardh, 255
and American politics, 221 Bediako, Kwame, 94
Left Behind books, 211-15, 218, Bellah, Robert, 221
224, 230 Bell, Maria, 394
and Satan, 214-16 Belloc, Hilaire, 14
theology, formal, 215-20 Beltran, Beigno, 47-49, 53, 58
theology, popular, 220-24 Bendroth, Margaret, 27-28
Archambault, Joseph-Papin, 342 Benedict, St., 297
Ashdown, James Henry, 330, 337 Benedict XVI, Pope, 243
Athanasius, 306 Berdyaev, Nicholas, 134
432 INDEX

Bergler, Thomas, 173 Catholicism

Bible Chinese, 24, 231-43, 238, 241, 243, 244
Acts 2:43, 195 on folk Christianity, 41-42
Acts 3:1-10, 195 Hispanic, 112-13, 116-24
Acts 4:13, 195 and immigration, 353, 375-76
Jeremiah 21:22, 83 vs. Orthodox Church, 151-52
John 3:8, 209 Puerto Rican rituals, 110
John 4:48, 194 in Quebec, 28
John 18:36, 202 on sexuality and marriage, 28-29, 351-76
Mark 5:21-43, 102 social, 337-50, 342
Matthew 10:8, 195 trade unions, 345-47
Matthew 11:2-6, 194 CCPA. See Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association
Matthew 25:29, 199 Cecilia, Madame, 355-56
Bilheimer, Robert S., 283, 285-86, 295 celibacy, 353, 373-74
bioethics, 393 Cetrez, Onver, 257-58
birth. See life and death Chaney, James, 67
Black Nazarene, 37, 41 Charbonneau, Joseph, 347
Bland, Salem, 336 charismatics, 169, 175
Bonacci, Mary Beth, 368-72, 373 charitable work, 147-48
Bondi, Roberta, 10 Charleston, Steven, 397
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 265 chastity, 359, 374
Booth, William, 172 Chidester, David, 13
born-again experiences, 23 Chilstrom, Herbert, 281, 285-86, 289
Bourassa, Henri, 341 China Inland Mission, 164
Bourgeoys, Marguerite, 339-40 Chinese Catholicism, 24-25, 231-43, 238, 241, 243,
Boyer, Paul, 220-21 244
Branham, William, 175 educational activities, 241-42
Brigden, Beatrice, 335 future of, 240-43
Bruland, Esther Byle, 304 government-recognized, 232-35
Buddhism, 41 martyrs, 238-40
Bula, Omega, 84 and patriotism, 232, 233
Bulgakov, Sergei, 134 reconciliation in, 236-37
Burke, T. W„ 364-65 underground segment, 235, 235-36
Bush, George W„ 219 and Vatican, 232-38
Bushnell, Horace, 313 Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association (CCPA), 24,
Buswell, J. Oliver, 165 231, 233, 243
Chittister, Joan, 281, 285-86, 295
Campbell, Joseph, 222 Christian Family Movement, 358, 366
Canadian Pacific Railroad (CPR), 327-31 Christianity
Cannon, Katie, 90 and Christendom, 7-9
Cardenal, Ernesto, 206 global, 6-7
Carr, Anne E., 309 on life and death, 386-90
Carroll, Patrick, 373 and Nazism, 25, 26, 265-79, 267
Carter, Jimmy, 157 as people’s history, 5-6, 11-13
Cassebon, Jean-Guy, 344 statistics, 7-8, 30, 309, 401-2 n.10
Cassells, Verna, 90 Christian retail, 180-87, 182-85
 Index 433

church Davis, Walter, 92

failure to protect people, 16-17 death. See life and death
as family, 110, 114-16 DeLee, S. B., 71
Orthodox, 131-56 DeLee, Victoria Way, 21, 61-71, 62, 81
as people of God, 3, 114 civil rights activism, 75-77
and state, 203-4, 207 doubts, 73
Church of Sweden, 248-50, 249, 255 holiness, 77
Cico, Marika, 2 moral piety, 77-78
Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians, religious practice, 74
21-22, 83-106 DeMar, Gary, 219
on agency, 102-4 DeMarinis, Valerie, 25, 260
alliances, 105-6 Dennis, David, 67
goals, 86, 90 d’Epinay, Christian Lalive, 201
logo, 85, 94 Deshon , George, 354-56, 354
on spirituality, 97-98 destiny, 44-45
themes, 95-96 Devil. See Satan
civil rights diversity, 8, 97
South African, 17 Dobson, James, 162, 187
southern U.S., 21, 63, 70-71, 75-78, 81 Dole, Elizabeth, 157
class bias, 37-38, 80-81 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 133
Clemens, Alphonse, 361-64 Dubcek, Alexander, 145
Cole-Arnal, Oscar, 28 d’Youville, Marguerite, 340
Colson, Charles, 162, 187 Dyrness, William A., 14
Columbus, Christopher, 217
colonization, 20, 39-40, 397 Earl, Riggins, 72
comic books, 224-30 EATWOT. See Ecumenical Association of Third
Communism, 22-23, 138-40, 145-46 World Theologians
community Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians
of accountability, 21 (EATWOT), 89, 94-95, 98, 105
Filipino, 46-47 ecumenical movement, 17-18
in Spanish Harlem, 109, 111 ecumenism, 26-27, 280-306, 302, 305
concentration camps, 274 baptism, eucharist, ministry, 291-95
Confessing Church, 271, 274 defined, 280-81
conscience, 15, 113-14 and experience, 301-2
conversion, 41, 42, 205 and gift exchange, 27
Cornford, F. M„ 300 history, 285-87
cosmic relation, 40 monastic tradition, 295-98
CPR. See Canadian Pacific Railroad origins, 282-84, 286
Crosby, Fanny, 171 popular, 287-91
Crossley, Hugh, 171 reconciling memories, 298-301
crucifixion, 54-56 as revolutionary, 302-4
Cruzan, Nancy, 381-83 as serious, 302
Cruz, Miguel de la, 37 unrealized aims, 304-6
Edet, Rosemary N., 94
Daniels, Les, 226 emotions, 20
Darby, John Nelson, 218, 218 Eskridge, Larry, 169, 176-77
434 INDEX

Espin, Orlando, 38 making of, 40-42

evangelicalism, 23, 72-75, 157-88 procession, 48
Canadians, 166-67 and spirituality, 50-52
and charismatics, 169, 175 Flavier, Juan, 49-50
images of, 158-59, 159 folk dancing, 150
influence of, 187-88 food, Filipino, 52, 58
and Jesus Movement, 175-77, 181 Forbes, Bruce, 24
locating practitioners, 161-62 Forest, Jim, 2
and materialism, 180-87 Fortin, Benoit, 348
megachurches, 178, 178-79 Foster, Richard}., 166
and music, 170-79, 188 Freedom Summer, 74
and Pentecostalism, 169, 174-75 Freudenberg, Adolph, 274
and prayer, 163-68 Friesen, Gerald, 330
public worship, 168-79 Fritsche, Meter, 266
revivalism, 170, 172, 172 fundamentalism and gender, 322-25
statistics, 162
studies on, 159-61 Gauthier, Denyse, 348
Evers, Medger, 67 Gellately, Robert, 276
evil. See good and evil gender
existential ritualizing, 25, 245-61 in Christianity, 27-28, 307-26
and diversity, 260 and fundamentalism, 322-25
examples, 252-59, 255, 256 natures, 85
expressions, 250-52 and ordination of women, 307-8
future of, 259-61 roles, 312-16, 321
meaning of, 246 sensitivity, 91-92, 103
Genovese, Eugene, 72
Fabella, Virginia, 88, 89 Georgen, Donald, 373-74
faithful, 14-16 Gerin-Lajoie, Marie-Lacoste, 343
family claim, 312-16 God
and fundamentalism, 324 as all-powerful, 44-45
second wave, 316-22 as father, 359
family planning, 368, 372 as lover, 359
Fan Xueyan, 235-36 motherhood of, 333
feminism, second wave, 316-17 playing, 398-99
feminist liturgies, 254-56, 255, 256 good and evil, 24, 224-30
Fernandez, Eleazar, 15, 19-21, 46 Goodman, Andrew, 67
fertilization, 381 Graham, Billy, 161, 187, 212
fiestas, 42, 44, 46, 58 Graham, Ruth Bell, 166
Filipino Christianity, 20-21, 37-59 Grant, Jacquelyne, 90
on agency, 44-45 Gray, James, 165
bias toward, 38 Gray, Victoria, 70
on community, 46-47 Greeley, Andrew, 5, 14
and creativity, 42-44 Grenz, Stanley, 218
on destiny, 44-45 Groulx, Lionel, 341
as folk, 38, 41-42 Guyart, Marie, 339
 Index 435

Haley, Joseph, 359-61 guide, 117, 123, 124

Hamer, Fannie Lou Townsend, 21,61-71, 63, 68, as healer, 194
73, 81 as icon, 7, 7, 8, 19, 41, 47, 147
civil rights activism, 75, 78-80 and marriage, 370
early theism, 74 resurrection, 55-57
leadership, 78 as ruler, 216
religious practice, 74 as savior, 49, 161
Hamer, Perry, 71 second coming, 217
Harding, Vincent, 73 as servant, 124
Harjo, Joy, 30 suffering, 39, 47-48, 52-54
“Perhaps the World Ends Here,” 27 as warrior, 214-15
Harris, Barbara, 318 Jesus Movement, 175-77, 181
Hayford, Jack, 175 Jewett, Robert, 222-24, 227
Healey, Joseph, 3 Jim Crow justice, 62-63, 70, 72-75
healing, miraculous, 193-96 Jocano, F. Landa, 42, 45
Hefner, Philip, 377, 386 John (apostle), 195, 216
Henry, Patrick, 26 John the Baptist, 194
Hispanization, 40 John XIII, Pope, 348
Hodgson, Dorothy, 316 John Paul II, Pope, 236, 239, 285, 319, 368
Holocaust, 17, 265-79 Johnston, Isabel, 89
children, 275, 276 Jones, William, 73
concentration camps, 274 Judaism vs. Orthodox Church, 152-53. See also
rescuers, 273-77 anti-Semitism
hope, 83
Hu Jintao, 244 Kanyoro, Musimbi, 88, 89, 89, 96, 99-100
Huddleston, Mary Anne, 373 katalona, 40
humility, 38, 48-49 Kelly, Audrey, 363
Humphrey, Hubert, 80 Kelly, Gerald, 359, 362-63
Hunter, John, 171 Kilde, Jeanne Halgren, 217
Hybels, Bill, 166, 178 Kinsey, Albert, 361
Kirby, Jack, 227
Ileto, Reynaldo, 53 Kmetko, Farol, 276
individualism, 311-12 Koonz, Claudia, 268
Irvine, William, 336-37 Kraft, William, 373
Isaac, Jules, 278 Ku Klux Klan, 72
Isasi-Diaz, Ada Maria, 10, 12, 15, 19, 22 Kuma, Afua, 94
Islam, 40-41, 104, 131 Kwok Pui-lan, 27
Ivens, William, 334-35
labor movements, 28, 336-37
jeepneys, 37, 38 lamentation, 100-101
Jenkins, Jerry B., 212, 214, 219, 229 languages, African, 93
Jesus Christ, 99, 102, 202, 283, 298 Lantos, John, 378-79, 383
as ecumenical, 305 Lawrence, Bruce, 323
empathy with, 53 Lawrence, John Shelton, 222-24, 227
Filpinos on, 46, 52-54 Lefebvre, Claude, 343
436 INDEX

Left Behind books, 211-15, 218, 224, 230 praying to, 120, 122, 196, 356
Leger, Dolores, 348 veneration of, 155
LeHaye, Tim, 212, 214, 219, 229 materialism and evangelicalism, 180-87
Lenin, Vladimir, 138, 141 Mbuy-Beya, Bernadette, 88, 103
Leo XIII, Pope, 338 McDannell, Colleen, 180-81, 183, 185-87
Levac, Raymond, 344 McKinney, Louise, 328
Levesque, Georges-Henri, 343 McClung, Nellie, 333
Li Daonan, 233 MFDP. See Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party
life and death, 29-30, 377-400 migration, forced, 25
background, 377-79 millennialism, 24, 215-17
Christian response, 386-90 Mintz, Stanley W„ 23, 190-92, 195-96, 200, 205, 209
drama of, 383 missionaries, 9, 39-40, 185, 240, 314-16, 319
and family, 378 Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), 79
historical-cultural context, 381-85 Mojzes, Paul, 22, 133, 144
meaning of, 384 monastic tradition, 295-98
South Dakota culture, 379-81 Moody, D. L„ 165, 171
stories, 390-400 Moore, T. A., 332
and technology, 385-86 mothers, 87, 315
Liljas, Maria, 248 Motherwell, W.R., 328
I’lncarnacion, Marie de. See Guyard, Marie Mott, John R., 282, 284
Lindsey, Hal, 219 Mouw, Richard, 285-86
literature, African, 102 Mueller, George, 164, 164
Livingstone, Laura, 274 Mueller, Ludwig, 270, 270
Lodge, David, 358 Murray, Pauli, 307-8, 310, 312
Lucando, Max, 166 music and evangelicalism, 170-79, 188
Luckner, Gertrud, 274 mystery, 42-43
Luizzo, Viola, 67
Luther, Martin, 296 Nazism and Christianity, 26, 265-79, 267
lynchings, 66, 405 n.9 Nelson, John Wiley, 221-26, 229
Newman, John Henry, 304
MacDonald, John A., 328 Nissiotis, Nikos, 134
MacPhail, Agnes Campbell, 337 Njoroge, Nyambura, 88, 98
Magallanes, Fernando, 39 Noll, Mark, 13, 23
Mance, Jeanne, 339 Norris, Kathleen, 296, 297
Marchand, Jean, 343
Mark, Bishop of Ephesus, 137 Obi, Daisy, 89
Mark-Viverito, Melissa, 126 Oduyoye, Mercy Amba, 19, 21-22, 89, 96, 106, 321
marriage “May We Have Joy” (poem), 105
manuals, 28-29, 351-76, 369 O’Gara, Margaret, 27, 286
and sexuality, 357, 364-74 Oliner, Pearl, 275
Marsh, Charles, 72 Oliner, Samuel, 275
Marston, William Moltoun, 228 Olson, Carl, 219
Mary (mother of Jesus), 43, 54, 99, 118-19, 119, origins, 84-85, 88-89
239 Orthodox Church, 131-56, 149,150, 154
apparition, 194 charitable work, 147-48
as healer, 193, 194 and Communism, 138-40, 145-46
 Index 437

defined, 410 n.2 Pieris, Aloysius, 40

glossary of terms, 134-35 Pinn, Anthony, 73
history, 131-32 Pius XI, Pope, 239, 342-43, 35
lay theologians, 132-36 Pius XII, Pope, 233, 294
ordinary laity, 136-38 plantation system, 61-62
vs. other churches, 151-52 plurality, 105
resurgence, 153-56 Plus, Raoul, 358
rituals, 137, 144, 149-50 polygamy, 321
schism, 153 Popcak, Gregory, 367-72, 373
startsi, 132-36 Popovic, Justin, 134
survival tactics, 140-50 poverty, 16, 87
Ostrander, Richard, 163, 168 prayers, 110, 121-24, 158-60, 163-68,
Outler, Albert C., 304 233-35
Promise Keepers, 323, 323-24
PACWA. See Pan African Christian Womens Prost, Antoine, 311
Association protest, 109
Pan African Christian Women’s Association Protestantism
(PACWA), 84 German, 267-73
Panchang, Aling, 56 vs. Orthodox Church, 152
pangako, 57-59 social gospel, 327-37
Paris, Peter, 71 Pulliam, Joe, 66
Paton, Charlotte Graves, 103
Patton, William, 165 Quinlin, Karen Ann, 381-82
Paul VI, Pope, 357, 358, 365
Pederson, Ann, 29 racial laws, Nazi, 271
penitents, 48 racism, 21, 65-68, 101, 206, 397
Pentecostalism Ramobide, Dorothy, 320
and activism, 201-3 rapture, 214
on baptism, 196-98 Rawlyk, George, 163, 166-68
and conversion, 192-99, 204 Rebera, Ranjini, 320
and evangelicalism, 169, 174-75 resurrection, 54-57
future of, 206-9 retreats, 108-9, 114, 116, 122-23
Latin American, 11, 23-24, 190-209, 196, 204 revivals, 8-9, 170, 172, 172
and miraculous healing, 193, 193-96 Rio, Cesar del, 1,13
resurgence, 309 rituals
signs and wonders, 195 existential, 25, 245-61
speaking in tongues, 175, 192, 205 Filipino, 40-41, 46-47, 49
transfiguring, 203-6 Orthodox, 137, 144,149-50
on women, 192 Puerto Rican, 110
“Perhaps the World Ends Here” (Harjo), 27 Rivera-Pagan, Luis, 23-24
Peter (apostle), 195 Roach, Mary, 379
Peters, Ted, 393 Robert, Dana, 11, 314
Phelan, John Leddy, 40 Robertson, James Alexander, 41
Phiri, Isabel Apawo, 86, 88 Robertson, Pat, 162
Picard, Gerard, 346-47 Roberts, Oral, 175
Pich, Hugo, 265 Rosenberg, Alfred, 269
438 INDEX

Rossing, Barbara, 219 SNCC. See Student Non-violent Coordinating

Ross, Kenneth R„ 9 Committee
Ross, Rosetta, 19, 21 Social Catholicism, 337-50, 342
Roy, Henri, 344 action model, 344-45
background, 337-38
saints, Christian, 43 clerico-nationalism, 340-42
Sallman, Warner, 7, 184 forerunners, 338-40
San Buenaventura, Steffi, 41, 42 grassroots, 347-50
Sanders, Ethan, 23 think tanks, 342-44
Sankey, Ira, 171-72 trade unions, 345-47
Sanneh, Lamin, 30 social justice
Sann Manniska network, 253-54 and Canadian workers, 327-50, 329
Satan, 202, 209 movements, 28
and Apocalypse, 214-16 social gospel, 327-37
Antichrist, 229 Social Service Congress, 333
Scarfe, Alan, 141 Sofia (Wisdom), 256, 303
Schmidt, Leigh Eric, 159 South Dakota culture, 379-81
Schuler, Robert, 166 Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC),
Schiissler Fiorenza, Elisabeth, 300 78
Schwerner, Michael, 67 Soviet Union, 22-23
SCLC. See Southern Christian Leadership and Orthodox Church, 140-50
Conference Spanish Harlem, 22, 107-27, 108
Second Vatican Council, 17, 151, 292, and Americanization, 110-11
372 church closing, 124-27
secularization, 18 church history, 109-14
Seelisberg Address to Churches, 278 speaking in tongues, 175, 192, 205
self-flagellation, 48 spirits, Filipino, 39-40, 43
sensus fidelium, 14, 38 spirituality, African womens, 98-99
sex trade, 88 Staewen, Gertrud, 265, 274
sexuality Stahlhandske, Ulf, 253
abstinence, 351-52, 368, 372 Stalin, Josef, 141
manuals, 28-29, 351-76, 369 Stark, Rodney, 8-9, 18
and marriage, 357, 364-74 sterilization, 397
and psychology, 357-65, 375 Stoll, David, 204
repressed, 352-53 stories
as sacred pleasure, 365-74 of communities, 10
and sin, 356, 359 religion as, 5
womens, 96-97, 103 storytelling, 99-101
sharecropping, 61, 63-64, 71, 75-76 Stransky, Thomas, 280
Shearer, J. G., 332 strikes, 332, 332, 335, 337, 347
Sheldon, Charles, 182 Strong, Tracy, 274
Siegmund-Schultze, Friedrich, 273 struggle, 120
Sifton, Clifford, 329 Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee
Smith, A. E., 335 (SNCC), 78
Smith, Chuck, 176 suffering, 47-48, 53, 73, 121, 123
 Index 439

Sugarman, Tracy, 80 Westerns (drama form), 224-30, 225

superheroes, 224-30 Whitefield, George, 161
superstition, 150 white supremacy, 69-70
Suroyo acculturation, 256-59 Wiest, Jean-Paul, 24-25
Sybert, Donald, 3 Wilkinson, Bruce, 166
syncretism, 207 Willard, Frances, 333
Williams, Terry Tempest, 378
Taoism, 41 Wilson, William Julius, 80
Taylor, Hudson, 164,164 Wimber, John, 176
Temple, William, 280 Wingeren, Meter, 253
tenancy, 61, 63-64, 71, 75-76 Winnipeg General Strike, 332, 332, 335, 337
Tentler, Leslie Woodcock, 352, 355, 366 Wisdom. See Sofia
Territorial Grain Growers’ Association (TGGA), women
327-28 African religious roles, 321
theologians, African women, 83-106 African theologians, 83-106
Thigpen, Paul, 219 evangelicals, 167-68
Thomas, Latta, 72 feminist liturgies, 254-56, 255, 256
Thomas, Theodore, 274 liberation movement, 17, 101
Tilden-Hayes compromise, 70 literature, African, 102
Tillich, Paul, 208 and missions, 314
Tiso, Jozef, 276 mothers, 87, 87, 315
Torrey, Reuben, 165 Muslim African, 104
trade unions, Catholic, 345-47 oppression, 100
Traina, Cristina, 28 ordination, 307, 310, 318, 318-19
transformation, 58-59 and Pentecostalism, 192
translations, 7 in religious histories, 11
Trofimenkoff, Susan Mann, 339 rural Southern black, 61-81
sexuality, 96-97
values, Swedish, 246-47 in Spanish Harlem, 107-27
Vatican II. See Second Vatican Council Third World, 320, 320
Villegas, Carmen, 107-10, 116, 122, 124-26 in workplace, 317
violence in Southern Africa, 65-68 Woodsworth, James Shaver, 330, 331, 334, 336-37
voter registration, 70 Wright, Sara Rowell, 333
World Council of Churches, 84, 91, 283-84, 284, 288
Walters, Philip, 153 World Missionary Conference, 17
warfare, 13, 16
Watanabe, Sadao, 3 Youmans, Letitia, 333
Watts, Isaac, 170, 172
Weber, Eugen, 215 Zamboni, Camillo, 358
Wesley, Charles, 161, 170, 172 Zayas Alvarado, Anastacio (Taso), 23-24, 190-201,

Wesley, John, 161 202-4, 209

West, Christopher, 368-72, 373 Zayas, Elizabeth, 192, 197-98, 200, 202, 204, 209
 MARYGROVE COLLEGE LIBRARY

3 TE? ED47E 4

DATE DUE
 Twentieth-Century global Christianity
A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY, VOLUME 1

From Global to Local, the Many Faces

of Global Christianity—

As they have from the very first century, the highly diverse and creative religious lives of ordinary
Christians have decisively engaged the enormous developments of the twentieth century. However
tentatively they can all be pieced together, these are some of their stories. Whether in the sugar
cane fields of Central America or the cathedrals of Europe or the jails of Eastern Europe, popular
Christianity has displayed a variety of movements, currents, and countercurrents that invite yet
defy explanation. In these engrossing and visually rich chapters, expert observers of Christian
traditions and peoples showcase the multiple trajectories and rich ambiguity, the innovation and
transformation, the retrenchment and accommodation that have characterized Christianity in
what is arguably its most engrossing era ever. Along with the editor Mary Farrell Bednarowski, the
illustrious contributors to this volume include:

Victoria J. Barnett Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz Ethan R. Sanders

Margaret Bendroth Paul Mojzes Cristina L. H. Traina
Oscar Cole-Arnal Mark A. Noll Jean-Paul Wiest
Valerie DeMarinis Mercy Amba Oduyoye
Eleazar S. Fernandez Ann M. Pederson
Bruce David Forbes Luis N. Rivera-Pagan
Patrick Henry Rosetta E. Ross

Volume Editor—Mary Farrell Bednarowski is Professor Emerita of Religious Studies at United

Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities, Minnesota. Her books include American Religion: A
Cultural Perspective (1984); New Religions and the Theological Imagination in America (1989);
and The Religious Imagination of American Women (1999).

General Editor—Denis R. Janz is Provost Distinguished Professor of the History of Christianity

at Loyola University, New Orleans. He is editor of Three Reformation Catechisms: Catholic,
Anabaptist, Lutheran (1982) and A Reformation Reader (2d ed., 2008), and author of Luther and
Late Medieval Thomism (1983), Luther on Thomas Aquinas (1989), and World Christianity and
Marxism (1998).

Religion / History of Christianity

Fortress Press
The Power of Scholarship
fortresspress.com
peopleshistoryofchristianity.com