Democratization and Christianity

In the current special issue of the Boston Review, there are several articles -- two by historians -- on"The Believers." As Henry Farrell points out, the articles feature"lots of interesting argument about the relationship between religion and the left."

One of the feature essays is by Albert J. Raboteau, Professor of Religion at Princeton University, author of Slave Religion: The"Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South, and an Orthodox Christian. There is also an excellent piece by Gary B. Nash, emeritus Professor of History at UCLA, which uses three biographical sketches to show that the evangelical Christianity of the Great Awakening often empowered"ordinary people" to think and speak for themselves. Nash points to Richard Allen (one of the founding ministers of the African Methodist Episcopal Church), Jarena Lee (an African American woman who became an exhorter in Allen's church), and Lorenzo Dow (a poor but popular Methodist circuit rider without a formal education) as examples of what Nathan Hatch has described as the"democratization of American Christianity."

I was especially struck by Nash's discussion of the relationship between Jarena Lee and Richard Allen, because it contrasts with a similar relationship I've just been reading about. Lee's autobiography is published in Sisters of the Spirit, a collection that also includes the autobiography of Julia Foote, another African American woman who became conscious of a calling to preach after converting to Methodism. But Foote's experience with the elders of her AME church was very different from Lee's.

According to Nash, Richard Allen was initially reluctant to invite Jarena Lee into his pulpit. But after her repeated demonstrations of powerful preaching, he eventually relented. At the end of the 1830s, however, Julia Foote was cast out of the First AMEZ church in Boston, where the minister was African American abolitionist Jehiel C. Beman. Like Lee, Foote had ecstatic visions. She claimed to have heard the voice of God addressing her. But her charismatic sermons and her claims that she had been sanctified displeased her husband and the men of the church. In her autobiography, Foote recalled Beman forbidding her to preach her"holiness stuff" to the flock, despite the requests of some"elder sisters" to give her a hearing.

So Foote began preaching in small house meetings to disaffected members of the congregation. Needless to say, this did not make Beman happier, and according to Foote, he excommunicated her when she refused to stop preaching. Last Thursday, while reading about Foote and her visions in the beautiful new African American history reading room at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, I was moved by her description of Beman's skepticism. After one night of particularly vivid visions, Foote wrote,

... my minister, Jehial C. Beman, came to see me. He looked very coldly upon me and said: 'I guess you will find out your mistake before you are many months older.' He was a scholar, and a fine speaker; and the sneering, indifferent way in which he addressed me, said most plainly: 'You don't know anything.'

After reading Nash's article and reflecting back on Foote's story, I had two thoughts. They are not necessarily related to each other, and they are not directed at Nash's piece in particular:

The first thought: the democratization of American Christianity had important limits. On the one hand, Jehiel C. Beman himself could easily serve as another example for Nash's article. The son of a Connecticut slave who was freed after fighting in the American Revolution, Beman was a shoemaker who became a prominent pastor, a founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and a leader of African American voluntary associations in various parts of New England. But Beman's faith, while serving as an important agent of his own empowerment, did not necessarily entail Foote's empowerment. This would come as no surprise, of course -- to Nash or to Hatch, whose book charts a retreat by many American Methodists from their most democratic impulses. But I think it's important to include the stories of Footes and Bemans alongside the stories of Lees and Allens, if only to emphasize that the democratization spurred by Christianity was incomplete and fitful. It is also important to stress that even the"ordinary people" empowered by evangelical Christianity did not thereby find themselves in agreement on the scope of that empowerment.

A second thought: As the special issue of the Boston Review demonstrates, there are currently many efforts afoot to reclaim the democratic (small"d" or big"D") legacies of American evangelicalism. And pointing to figures like Foote serves these projects well. Yet I sense that many on the Left would like to applaud Foote's empowerment while simultaneously pooh-poohing her charismatic faith or endorsing her visions. In this sense, though, many scholars find themselves in the position of Beman. While disagreeing with his patriarchal repression of Foote's voice, they echo his"sneering, indifferent" condescension toward her"mistake." But if this is intended as a strategy for wooing evangelical Christians toward the Left, it seems to me like one that is doomed to fail. It does no good for democrats to say to"The Believers" that their history is progressive and democratic, if at the same time they say,"You don't know anything." It could be, of course, that many Democrats do not really mean to talk to"The Believers" at all. Perhaps many are mainly talking to each other about"The Believers," as if to say,"Those people sure don't know anything, but at least they're ordinary." I trust I don't need to point out why this will seem as cold and condescending to the Footes of the twenty-first century as Beman's reaction seemed to Julia Foote herself.

I think it is important for historians to tell the stories of people like Dow, Allen, Beman, Foote, and Lee. Many people who identify America as a"Christian nation" tell the history of evangelicalism as if its telos were the radical social conservatism of people like Tom DeLay. And articles like Nash's are useful for proving that Christianity in this nation has often been more open and democratic than the Christianity of its latter-day adherents. But ultimately, these historical ripostes to conservative Christians have a limited usefulness. First, they require historians of Christianity to follow Christians propagandists in ironing out the wrinkles in their favored visions of the past. As I've argued before, the major problem with lobbyists like David Barton of Wallbuilders is that their historical arguments are selective and oversimplified: they wave a copy of a Thanksgiving Day sermon and declare that the nation has Christian foundations. It's tempting to do the same thing from the other side: to wave a copy of Julia Foote's autobiography and declare that American Christianity has democratic foundations. But the more important contribution for historians to make is to point out the complications in both attempts to make the past staightforwardly"usable" in the present.

Second, and more importantly, offering duelling histories of American Christianity often keeps discussions in the past. And although (as an historian, of course!) I am all for discussions about the past, we must be careful not to put off indefinitely the hard conversations between"The Believers" and"The Non-believers" that need to be taking place in the present. At some point, those who think that Julia Foote is a democratic exemplar of Christian empowerment are actually going to have to listen and talk to the"ordinary people" who believe in God as fervently as she did. I do think that in many cases these conversations are beginning to get underway, and I wish them long life.