Paul Harvey

Some of you who find me here may be interested in following my short essay pieces for the online journal Religion Dispatches. The most recent one concerns David Barton, a self-styled historian and one-man intellectual entrepreneur from Texas, who recently declared that Barack Obama is America’s all-time most “biblically-hostile President.” The piece, a classic of bad history writing (I plan to use it in future classes to demonstrate the kinds of fallacies that historians should avoid) , is perhaps more importantly placed within the context of a history of hyperbolic rhetoric about the religiosity (or lack thereof) of American presidents. My essay “It’s Barack v. the Bible, Says Barton,” tries to set the current furor over a supposed “war on religion” in historical context. News flash: we have plenty of arguments about religion and politics all through American history, including now, but there is no “war on religion” going on. Indeed, as the excellent historian John Fea has recently explained, Obama may be the most explicitly Christian president in American history (even as he criticizes the administration’s lack of follow through in certain areas of faith-based initiatives).

Here are my other contributions to Religion Dispatches thus far; click on the link to read any of them. The topics range from pieces on the band Arcade Fire and the singer/performer Gillian Welch, to the superstar Christian financial advisor Dave Ramsey, to a review of the PBS series God in America, to the meaning of the 10th anniversary of 9/11. While you’re at it, my blog Religion in American History is going on 5 years old now, and I’ve got a roster of about 25 top scholars from across the country who contribute there, so make sure to check it out.

It’s Barack v. the Bible, Says Barton
Keeping the “Southern” in Southern Baptist Convention
Martin Luther King in the Era of Occupy
Why 9/11 Changed Everything Nothing
Fix the Economy GOD’$ WAY: Dave Ramsey’s Great Christian Recovery
Blessed With a Dark Turn of Mind: Gillian Welch’s Spiritual Strivings
Selling the Idea of a Christian Nation: David Barton’s Alternate Intellectual Universe
Arcade Fire and the Suburban Soul
Martin Luther King: Libertarian and Anti-Abortion Social Conservative
Congress Reads the Constitution, Tea Party-Style
“Liberal Nazis”: The Republican Crusade Against NPR
Country Music Minus the Culture Wars: A Lesson from a Legend
The Brutality of the American Eden
White Rockers in Search of Soul Salvation

If you are checking out this site, I hope you will follow me elsewhere:

Follow me on Twitter
“Like” my co-authored book The Color of Christ here
Follow podcasts on my books here
Read my group blog Religion in American History, which “directs the scholarly conversation” in the field
Read our blog from the History Department at the University of Colorado
More about me at my faculty website
Check out my Amazon book page 

And thanks for your support

Paul Harvey

Here’s at least part of the rest of the story, folks. Art Remillard, editor of the Journal of Southern Religion, has recorded a podcast with me here, about my book Moses, Jesus, and the Trickster in the Evangelical South. Click here for more information. The podcast is about 20 minutes.

Then, John Wilson and Stan Guthrie, editor of the fine journal Books and Culture, discuss the edited volume compiled by myself and Edward J. Blum, the Columbia Guide to Religion in American History, in this podcast (about 5 minutes). About the book, in a promo for the podcast, they write the following:

In this week’s podcast, Stan Guthrie and I discussThe Columbia Guide to Religion in American History, edited by Paul Harvey and Edward Blum, who have brought together a terrific lineup of contributors. Books of this sort rarely invite sustained reading. Here is a sterling exception. I know this volume will soon be on the shelves of many contributors to Books & Culture.

I’m very pleased to announce the publication of my book Moses, Jesus, and the Trickster in the Evangelical South (University of Georgia Press, 2012). I just received my hot-off-the-press copy today; the book should be generally available for purchase in about 2-3 weeks. The book represents the published/expanded form of lectures given at Mercer University back in the fall of 2008; in fact, chapter 2 was a lecture I gave on the evening of Tuesday evening, November 4, 2008. One of my best friends from college, Bill Underwood, formerly interim president of Baylor University, is now president of Mercer University, and graciously hosted a post-lecture election watching party on that historic evening.

Images from the book will be posted here soon. Because I put in a number of paintings in the book, I thought I would use the opportunity provided by my personal website/blog to post some of this artistic material in color, since it had to be reproduced in black and white for the book.

Here is just a little bit from the introduction, summarizing some of the major themes of this work, which incorporates historical primary sources, literature (including extended analyses of Absalom, Absalom!, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Edward P. Jones’s The Known World), art (including paintings by Clementine Hunter, Purvis Young and Sister Gertrude Morgan), film, music (a lot of that), and material culture:

Won’t somebody tell me, answer if you can!
Want somebody tell me, what is the soul of a man
I’m going to ask the question, answer if you can
If anybody here can tell me, what is the soul of a man?
I’ve traveled in different countries, I’ve traveled foreign lands
I’ve found nobody to tell me, what is the soul of a man

 When the pioneering gospel blues slide guitarist Blind Willie Johnson recorded “What Is the Soul of Man?” for Columbia records in the late 1920s, he challenged listeners to ponder a question central to the religious experience.  . . . This book tours some of the answers Protestants in the American South historically have given to the philosophical quandary posed by Blind Willie Johnson. How did southern Protestants, black and white, from the eighteenth century to the civil rights era, grapple with the intractable religious and philosophical questions, through religious expression and belief? How did they come to terms with questions about the soul of man? Most particularly, how did they do so through religious institutions, thought, and culture? How did they do so through theology, folklore, music, art, drama, and film? And why did their cultural expressions of religious faith characteristically take on an intensity and vivacity that continues to attract our attention today, giving the South its Bible Belt image. . .

To understand fully how southern believers have defined the soul of man, we must broaden our field of vision beyond the usual suspects in the study of southern religion. Here, we will do so through an examination of four historical literary archetypes: Moses, Jesus, the Trickster, and Absalom. Moses and Jesus are familiar, Absalom and the Trickster less so, yet they too have been formative to creating the southern sacred. Southerners’ answers to questions about the soul of man suggest the power of evangelical Protestantism in southern history, as well as the ways in which that power consistently has been challenged and questioned. Skeptics have nibbled around the edges of the evangelical culture that came to cultural dominance after the Civil War. Literary figures, cultural archetypes, and musical explorations have added layers of cultural complexity to what otherwise might be seen as a solid South of evangelicalism.

. . . .   If Jesus has been a pure figure in white southern theology, he could become a trickster of the trinity in black thought and lore. If Moses has represented deliverance, then Absalom has shown how the Egyptians and the Israelites in fact were entangled in one narrative. Absalom suggests that the southern drive for purity, and the obsession with miscegenation, covered over the fact that no people were more impure. The design of the masters of southern history–for racial and religious purity, and for a definition of freedom that depended on order, obedience, and hierarchy–was a hoax. Throughout southern history, the soul of man has burst those bonds, and produced a rich cultural history in song, sermon, art, tale, dance, and literature.

Paul Harvey, Professor of History and Presidential Teaching Scholar at the University of Colorado.

• Amazon book page
• Faculty website
• Religion in American History blog
• UCCS History Department and the Department blog 
• images to accompany the recent book Moses, Jesus, and the Trickster in the Evangelical South