Historical Facts

Paul Harvey

Mike Altman and others here frequently have called to expanding the boundaries of the sacred for analysis, and since various contributors here have posted on everything from Disney Religion to Green Day's American Idiot to early modern tattoos, I should think this would be a receptive venue for an expansive view of religious ritual.

All the same, there's plenty of room here for traditional theological analysis. I"m going to guest post something soon from Jeremy Bangs, about the theological/social worldview of the Pilgrims, which he believes challenges much existing scholarship in the area.

But before we get there, a priceless document for theological analysis has just come to our attention: Dan Gilbert, majority owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, in an open letter addressed to "All of Northeast Ohio and Cleveland Cavaliers Fans Wherever You May Be Tonight."

In case you've been living in a cave this week, let me bring you up to speed: LeBron James has decided to sign with the Miami Heat, joining new teammates Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh. Said act was announced in an hour-long show of absurdist theater (actually 2 hours, it seems like) last night on ESPN. Since NPR and the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, et al covered the story as well, I assume that those of you who could give a rat's behind about all this nonetheless could not escape the news story no matter how much you wanted to.

Of more interest to me is owner Gilbert's response (hilariously posted in Comic Sans font, as blog reader Matt Bowman pointed out to me), full of sound and (impotent) fury. The letter might as well have been labeled: "LeBron Shouldn't Tap."

Theologically speaking, many important lines of American religious thought crash together (Nascar style) here. Let me count the ways, or at least a few of them:

1) a critique of a culture of narcissism, with a jab at the "narcissistic, self-promotional build-up" to the televised special. Here, of course, we are into Christopher Lasch land, and I'll just point you to this series of posts by our contributor John Fea for more there. Coming from an NBA owner, naturally this is pot calling kettle black stuff, but I'm less interested here in the evident hypocrisy than in the adoption of a pluralistic world of theological motifs.

2) "The self-declared former 'King' will be taking the 'curse' with him down south. And until he does 'right' by Cleveland, James . . . will unfortunately own this dreaded spell and bad karma."

Where to begin?? We have Ham's curse together with allusions to some sort of witchery (presumably Pat Riley is the Wizard). We have a common sense view of fairness and justice, and a defensiveness about Cleveland reminiscent of the biblical verse about what good could ever come out of Nazareth. The end reference to karma is likely just cultural cliche, almost completely shorn now of its religious referent (similar to how the term "redemption" is commonly used -- "wow, he really redeemed himself with that putt on the 18th") -- but more charitably, I will assume owner Gilbert has read Stephen Prothero and Thomas Tweed's extensive primary source volume Asian Religions in America, and thus speaks from a profound knowledge of the extensive influence from the nineteenth century forward of Asian religious concepts on the American psyche.

3) Weirdly juxtaposed alongside the abundant Arminian references to assured salvation and the bitterly expressed communal utopianism (guaranteeing that long-suffering Cleveland fans will enjoy the championship hardware before the false prophet LeBron ever does) is a profound aphorism of Hardshell Baptist theology:

"Some people think they should go to heaven but not have to DIE to get there."

I can hear the Appalachian preacher's end-of-line punctuation point -- "ha" -- at the end there, and the capitalization and thus verbal emphasis on DIE comes straight from many a camp meeting sermon a la Kentucky ca. 1805. But more likely, owner Gilbert got this theology via the way everyone else got it in the 1970s, from the Steve Miller Band's "Big Old Jet Airliner," with the line about having to go through hell before you get to heaven. Dante would have been singing along.

Finally, there is the emphasis from Romans 13, about all things working together for good. As Gilbert explains, "This heartless and callous action can only serve as the antidote to the so-called 'curse' on Cleveland, Ohio." Here, the false prophet has been exposed and driven out of town, and the alleged salvation that the prophet would bring can now be seen as just another sacrifice for Baal. The prophet was a conjuror, casting a spell and bringing the curse with the fetish bag of chalk powder (or whatever that white stuff was) thrown up before every game. Those fans who burned the jerseys understood that purification is the communal expiation to rid the last vestiges of the evil and witchery of the false prophet/conjuror. As the slaves sang, "Old Satan is a liar and a conjurer too, If you don't mind, he'll conjure you."

(Needless to say, the burning also calls to mind some of the most disturbing images of American history; for a much more serious analysis of that issue and the whole aspect of the hyperbolic anger directed at a routine business decision, see Tenured Radical's post "A Meditation on the American Way of Rage").

There's much, much more here, theologically speaking, and I invite comments to add to the mix. Until then, goodbye to the people I trusted. LeBron will get rich(er), for sure, but in the meantime he'll get busted.

Art Remillard

When I think of “muscular Christianity,” I don’t immediately imagine the “body as temple” theologians, as Clifford Putney has called them. Yes, the Luther Gulicks gave the movement intellectual heft. And yes, it was Gulick who encouraged the Presbyterian minister James Naismith to invent basketball—or as I like to call it, “That Sport Lebron James Plays.” All good stuff, really. But when I think of muscular Christianity, my first image is Billy Sunday.

Theology meant little to the revivalist. Instead, Sunday was more concerned with putting some muscle on to Jesus. “Lord save us,” he prayed, “from off-handed, flabby-cheeked, brittle-boned, weak-kneed, thin-skinned, pliable, plastic, spineless, effeminate, sissified, three-carat Christianity.” In Sunday’s eyes, Jesus “was the greatest scrapper that ever lived.”

Sunday represented a side of muscular Christianity that was thoroughly fretting the so-called “feminization” of Christianity. With each call to fling a “fastball at the devil,” Sunday sought to pull the faithful into his manly zone of influence.

While baseball was a national obsession in Sunday's time, it's a cure for insomnia now. Indeed, for many young men walking in to my classroom, ultimate fighting has become the sport of choice. I don’t watch mixed-martial-arts (MMA), nor do I understand its appeal. But it is popular. And as you might expect, MMA is developing an evangelical edge.

Jason David Frank is a rising star in MMA circles who first gained fame starring in—wait for it—the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Frank, a sixth-degree black, is also co-owner of Jesus Didn’t Tap, a MMA merchandising company. In ultimate fighting, “tapping out” is lingo for forfeiting a fight. “Jesus is the only one that truly didn't tap,” Frank says while describing the company's name. “They say, ‘Oh, he was nailed to the cross so he couldn’t tap.’ Well, you can verbally tap, you can verbally cry, ‘I quit! I give up!’ That's not what he did. He got crucified for all our sins.”

So this incarnation of Billy Sunday might not swing a bat, but he does beat the snot out of people—in the name of Jesus. “When I'm in the cage, I'm full of rage, I'll ground, pound, kick you in the face, but it's all good ‘cause I’m in the right place. The power I get is driven from God, so don’t be mad, it’s just my job.”

Frank isn’t making money from this venture yet, and he might not. But the message seems to Christianize America’s “neo-macho” discourse. Journalist Richard Goldstein coined the term “neo-macho” to describe the sustained rebellion against feminism that only amplified after 9/11. Then, the eloquent Toby Keith united a nation, singing, “Justice will be served/And the battle will rage/This big dog will fight/When you rattle his cage/And you'll be sorry that you messed with The U.S. of A./‘Cause we'll put a boot in your ass/It’s the American way.”

Neo-macho man is certainly still with us. He tells us that our pickup truck isn't complete without a RAMBOX to “carry your tools” in. And for the evangelical version, he's amused when a preacher says something about Jesus being a “scrapper.” But he really likes it when that preacher punches someone in the face (instead of turning the other cheek).

Review of Casey Nelson Blake, ed., The Arts of Democracy: Art, Public Culture, and the State (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). ISBN-13: 978-0-8122-4029-0. 361 pages.Review by Andrew HartmanIllinois State UniversityJuly 2010“At stake in every struggle over art there is also the imposition of an art of living, that is, the transmutation of an arbitrary way of living into the

Paul Harvey

In the Footsteps of William James, a Symposium... for honoring—and making use of—William JamesThe William James Society, in cooperation with the Chocorua (NH) Community Association and Harvard’s Houghton Library, is planning a long-weekend symposium, August 13-16, 2010, to honor the life of James on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his death. In the spirit of James, the symposium, “In

Having engaged in some long-form commenting below, here's a little short-form blogging on three topics of interest to this blog and its readers:1) David Lowenthal, author of the terrific The Past is a Foreign Country, thinks we are become more presentist, which is not a good thing. I'm not sure if the "we" Lowenthal has in mind is Americans or people in the twenty-first century (it's certainly

by Matt Sutton

I was hesitating to do a 2010 version of “Know Your Archives” for the sake of the Springfield, MO, Chamber of Commerce. But since Paul asked for it…

In late May I returned to the Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center for research. I was there eight years ago, on my first major research trip as a graduate student. At that time, I had no funding, but was offered access to a confidential file I really wanted to see on the condition that I show up in person. I did. I stayed as a shady Red Roof Inn and took the public bus to the archives each day. I figured my less-than-favorable view of the area was colored by my economic status at the time.

This summer, traveling as faculty of an under-funded state institution, I managed to swing a room at the Holiday Inn Express (with a view of the minor league baseball field) and a rental car (a very manly Chevy HHR) from Enterprise. The Assemblies’ archivists continue to be wonderful, and while there I met a recent Duke PhD who regaled me with stories of DVDs she had been watching of “amateurs and their machine guns” when not perfecting for herself the name-it-and-claim-it philosophy she was studying (she landed a great job—it must work). We checked out the picture of Grant Wacker’s grand-daddy in the pentecostal Hall of Fame and I learned that the father of another famous religious historian played a role in one of my favorite movies, A Thief in the Night.

Sadly, Springfield still looked the same as it did almost a decade ago. Jogging through downtown reminded me of walking around Detroit. It is a sad, bombed-out city.

From there I went to New York, first to do research at the Schomberg Center. Either New York is regressing, or I was in the wrong places at the wrong times. At one point a guy on the subway started flipping out. A woman pulled a canister of pepper spray out of her purse, un-holstered it, and threatened to pull the trigger. I prayed that I would not experience the effects of pepper spray in a small, confined, underground area (luckily I didn’t).

From there it was off to the NY Public Library. I spent a few hours working at a computer while another man quietly worked next to me. At one point another patron, intrigued by something on my neighbor’s screen, stopped and asked him about it. Out of nowhere he started screaming at her, calling her all sorts of expletives. Ah… big city life.

With the subway and the library providing some challenges, I decided to relax by jogging in Central Park. All was well until I passed an older Russian man, who for reasons that are still not clear to me, started screaming—at me. He must have known that I spent the ‘80s watching Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Red Dawn, War Games, and Spies Like Us. I just kept jogging.

From there it was on to the FDR library in beautiful Hyde Park. Trying to save some money, I opted not to rent a car and instead to stay in the Golden Manor Motel across the street from the library. I booked the $55/night room, but got a free upgrade to the $65/night room. It smelled worse than a hundred-year old Michigan basement on a hot humid day. I will spare you the rest of the details. An up-and-coming new Yale PhD told me that it was a decent place to stay. Apparently Yale is also suffering from the financial crisis. Nevertheless, the local pizza, a forty from the quickie-mart down the street, and the television remote-control (which I had to check out from the front desk) made for one exciting evening watching justice prevail as the Lakers stomped the Celtics to win the NBA championship.

Despite these travails, I returned home with suitcases full of scanned images and photocopies. Now, I better get back to actually writing this stuff up…