Cross-posted at Religion in American History

A theme of water connects Chip Callahan’s wonderful post yesterday at  the Religion in American History blog to this one. Today, I encourage you to pick up a copy of Michael Pasquier’s recently edited Gods of the Mississippi.

In 1999, Indiana University Press published Gods of the City, a volume edited by Robert Orsi that explored how urban space and the experience of living in it form urban religiosities. The similarly named Gods of the Mississippi examines how religion moved and adapted along the Mississippi River and its banks from expeditions to its source to living in its delta. Neither the river nor the religions on it were ever stationary; rather, the religious worlds of those near the Mississippi were often in flux. The Mississippi’s waters mattered to the religions of the region in manners topographical and imagined, actual and perceived, new and old, physical and symbolic, but never static. As a river is a constantly changing space of flux, so to the religions of it. Pasquier notes in the Introduction, “religious beliefs and practices were made and unmade and remade in these watery worlds known for their high levels of spatial and temporal fluidity.”

What follows the Introduction are nine excellent essays and an epilogue by Thomas Tweed. Tweed makes sense as the book’s final voice. His 2006 Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion and his introduction from 1997’s Retelling U.S. Religious History, with its emphasis on sightings, can be sensed throughout the Gods of the Mississippi’s pages in terms of theorizing and taking seriously how location shapes narrative. Many of the book’s contributors are no strangers to this blog’s readers; Art Remillard takes us along with adventurers searching for the river’s source, Sylvester Johnson illustrates how missionaries worked as the “‘civilizing’ religion of empire” for Anglo-America’s expansion into the Mississippi Territory, Jon Sensbach shows us the “spiritual bricolage” of black colonial Louisiana, and Alison Collis Greene follows the mobile religious institutions of itinerant sharecroppers.

Many of the essays will work well on their own in undergraduate classrooms. Collectively the volume convinces readers that the river itself was an actor in the Mississippi’s

Photo by Dorothea Lange, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/fsa1998021686/PP/

religious worlds. The river bend at Nauvoo and surrounding topography shaped Mormons and their critics; the fertile land the river supported attracted the imperialism of the U.S. War Department and missionaries; the flow of water connecting river settlements and the Atlantic World provided mobility to black religion; the finding of the river’s source was an activity of ownership both physical and symbolic; and developments in industry changed religious orientations to the river—these all illuminate how physical space is never simply that without neglecting to take seriously the significance of the materiality of space. The river was both space and process, a thing and an idea. And, as Tweed states in the afterword, this understanding of the Mississippi and its significance “allows for more expansive vistas” and pushes us “towards richer narratives.” Much like Callahan’s edited New Territories, New Perspectives: The Religious Impact of the Louisiana Purchase, Gods of the Mississippi bucks against an east-to-west story of American religious history and narrates a story from the continent’s interior.

My post today is a “this day in history” from my dissertation research. My dissertation examines how the beliefs and practice of Spiritualism helped Afro-creoles mediate the political, social, and cultural changes in New Orleans as the city moved from the antebellum period through Reconstruction. The messages the Cercle Harmonique received from the spirit world and the spirits who sent them offered the circle a forum for airing their political grievances and a place to imagine a more egalitarian world. Certain republican ideals, particularly those inherited from the memory of the French Revolution, were reinvigorated and reworked to relate to contemporary issues. While American religious history typically associates Spiritualism with white, liberal Protestants living in the northeast, I explore Spiritualism as practiced by New Orleanian Afro-creoles.

On March 25, 1869, the spirit “Lamenais,” a spirit who frequented the circle’s table, came to compare President Abraham Lincoln and Jesus. This wasn’t the first time that he taught via comparison; on another occasion this spirit explained how the creation of the US and the birth of Jesus both signaled new eras in humanity. This spirit, “Lamenais,” though spelled with only one “n” in his séance record sign-offs, was French priest Hugues-Félicité Robert de Lamennais (1782-1854). Lamennais was raised in a royalist household, but as he became increasingly interested in politics, Lamennais became more critical of the French Church and the government. He argued that the role of the Church was supposed to be fighting for the people, reforming society, and advancing justice. It would be his 1834 publication Paroles d’un Croyant (Words of a Believer) that would get him officially condemned by the Vatican in the Papal Encylical Singulari nos (July 7, 1834). And his support for the Revolution of 1848 and his election as a deputy for Paris to the Constituent Assembly certainly didn’t help his standing with the Pope. But it made him popular in New Orleans. Lamennais’s Catholic background, combined with his willingness to be critical of the Church institution and “tyrants” of any form made him an attractive spirit for the Afro-creole Cercle Harmonique, who themselves came from creole Catholic families.

The message channeled by the medium 144 years ago covered a lot of territory. Lamennais expressed his approval of Narciso López’s struggle for Cuban independence from Spain; he predicted that through the “mysterious ways of the Divine Providence, Human Slavery shall disappear little by little on this continent;” he discussed the continuous struggle between “Progress” and “Truth” and “moral slavery;” and he reprimanded Catholic priests in the South for their support of the Confederacy “preaching the sanctity of the horrible institution of slavery” and “blessing banners of the battalions which were forging new and stronger chains for their brothers.”

A key part of his message was his discussion of Lincoln—Lincoln who “sealed with his precious blood, the funeral stone which must cover Human Slavery.” For Lamennais, the comparison between Lincoln and Jesus was a simple one. “One died for Humanity; the other was sacrificed for wishing to liberate the black race, subdued under a degrading yoke by brute force.” Indeed, Lamennais’s message concluded with the sentence, “Bless Jesus and Lincoln: one will regenerate Humanity; the other, the Republic of the United States.”

The pro-Lincoln, pro-republicanism, anti-slavery message jived with the political goals and orientation of the Afro-creoles at the séance table that spring of 1869. And the message came with authority. A revolutionary Catholic priest not only chose to communicate with the circle but he also shared their political views and, with them, hoped for continued progress.

Cross-posted at Religion in American History

Mardi Gras Day. Like most things in the US, Carnival in Louisiana has a darker past than its lively, fun atmosphere today gives away. During the mid- to late-nineteenth century, krewes like Comus, Rex, and Proteus formed and established themselves as high-class social clubs for the local plutocracy (though Carnival in New Orleans goes back further in time). In Lords of Misrule: Mardi Gras and the Politics of Race in New Orleans (1997), James Gill explores the historical origins behind the statement, “Mardi Gras may be best known to the outside world as a public festival, but upper-class New Orleans knew that its real significance lay in the annual reaffirmation of social eminence over merit.” Racism, classism, and blood are stamped on Carnival’s past. Though an English visitor to the city in 1846 took offense to Carnival for its racial blending, “official” Mardi Gras would emerge from the Civil War as a largely white affair. (“The strangeness of the scene,” the visitor wrote, “was not a little heightened by the blending of the negroes, quadroons, and mulattoes in the crow, and we were amused by observing the ludicrous surprise, mixed with contempt, of several unmasked, stiff, grave Anglo-Americans from the north who were witnessing for the first time what seemed to them so much mummery and tomfoolery.”). Talking about the history of black Mardi Gras in New Orleans will have to be another post at another time.

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The Mistick Krewe of Comus may have sat Mardi Gras out during the Civil War and Union occupation of the city, but they came back strong during the era historians have called The Lost Cause. Following the war, the main krewes (Rex, Comus, and the new Twelfth Night Revelers) sought to celebrate Anglo-Saxon supremacy. Confederate soldiers, the Confederate cause, the Old South itself were all glorified in the Lost Cause movement. The Ku Klux Klan, the White League, and the White Knights were all various violent manifestations of the ideology. A dual government of local white “Redeemers” led by John McEnery rivaled the President Grant recognized Republican state government. The same pool of local white men who served in McEnery’s government, were often members of the White League and members of one of the city’s krewes. The social apparatus of white supremacy and upper-class power included all of these. In Lords of Misrule, Gill even identified the short rule of the White League following September 1874′s Battle of Liberty Place as “the Mistick Krewe’s reign over Louisiana.”

Rex 1903 Fétes and Feasts Procession Flyer

For more great Carnival ephemera, see the Louisiana State Museum’s Carnival Collection.

1873′s Mistick Krewe of Comus chose “The Missing Links to Darwin’s Origin of Species” as its theme. Designs for parade costumes are available via Tulane’s online archives. Many of the costumes are generic – a greyhound, a flying fish, a camel.

Mistick Krewe of Comus, 1873, Flying Fish costume design

Mistick Krewe of Comus, 1873, Greyhound costume design

But some animal designs were meant to be specific figures as well. The “Ass” was depicted as Charles Darwin, both in the design image and in the parade. The Rattlesnake was Republican Governor Henry Warmoth. The Hyena was General Benjamin Butler – the notorious (among Confederate supporters) Union general who first occupied the city during the Civil War. The Tobacco Grub was President Grant. The only animals that were identified as contemporary figures were those with political and social views that opposed the Mistick Krewe social apparatus. In short, they were the butt of the parade’s joke.

The Tobacco Grub depicted as President Ulysses S. Grant

The Hyena, depicted as General Benjamin Butler

The Rattlesnake, depicted as Governor Henry Warmoth

New Orleans is not alone for its raced Mardi Gras history. Watch Margaret Brown’s fantastic documentary The Order of Myths for a look at Carnival and race in Mobile (the final interview scene with her grandfather still gives me chills). Mardi Gras possesses a history that includes institutional and physical racial violence. Does that mean that no one should have fun today? Or that the parade season in New Orleans is wrong? Of course not. It means that, like most things in the US, Mardi Gras has a complicated and dark past. History is important. But, regardless, enjoy the day with a king cake and a drink or two! Or three … or four …

As a historian of religion in America, I’m familiar with Missouri’s Garden of Eden. According to Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, the garden was is the United States. And he’s not the only one to have claimed that the biblical Garden of Eden resided within the borders of the continental US. In the 1950s, Elvy Edison Callaway (a lawyer who was raised Baptist) opened the Garden of Eden Park near Bristol, Florida in the panhandle. After paying $1.10, visitors could walk through what Callaway said was the biblical Garden of Eden. The park is now a free hiking trail maintained by The Nature Conservancy. And it’s fairly easy to get to – simply take I-10 in the Florida panhandle and exit about 25 miles west of Tallahassee; then take highway 12 into Bristol, Florida. You’ll turn right on Garden of Eden Road, but look for the sign; it can be easy to miss. If only the 1950s sign was still there. (And yes, I totally hummed and maybe sang this while hiking up the ravine.)

Garden of Eden sign; photo from Florida State Archives, from http://floridamemory.com/
While the sign is no longer there, the cinder blocks on either side still line Garden of Eden Road as you approach the trail head

Garden of Eden Road

Trail head sign, 19 Jan 2013

Callaway himself was an interesting figure. If you curious for more on Callaway, check out this essay by Killing the Buddha editor Brook Wilensky-Lanford. Callaway is also a figure in her 2011 book Paradise Lust. Callaway came to the conclusion that this part of the Florida panhandle was the biblical Garden of Eden because of the topographic similarities between the area and the descriptions in the Bible. The Apalachicola River is fed by four small tributary rivers in a manner that for Callaway rivaled and surpassed the Tigris and Euphrates.  Furthermore, the area is home to some rare plants. Most notably, the torreya tree – a rare tree that bears a striking similarity to the gopher wood tree that Noah used to build the ark. Floridians claim that the torreya tree is one of the world’s rarest trees, and as one of the world’s oldest trees, it seems a strong contender for the biblical gopher wood tree.

When Callaway opened the Garden of Eden Park, it was filled with signs that informed park hikers what happened where. The signs are gone, but one can still peruse through a collection of photographs from 1953 on the Florida Memory site. The photos are great, and they are what convinced me to make the drive to Bristol and hike the trail. (Side note: many hiking sites claim this to be a strenuous hike. It’s not. My hiking partner and I had to drive onto Florida’s Torreya State Park for more hiking, and of course, more torreya trees!).

God’s Operating Table; photo from Florida State Archives, from http://floridamemory.com/

Adam and Eve’s first home; photo from Florida State Archives, from http://floridamemory.com/

Gopher wood tree sign; photo from Florida State Archives, from http://floridamemory.com/

Family looking at the Apalachicola River from the bluff in the Garden of Eden; photo from Florida State Archives, from http://floridamemory.com/

Apalachicola River from the Garden of Eden trail, 19 Jan 2013

These photographs really interest me because they make me think about the people who went to Garden of Eden Park. The old park signs said things like: “WHERE NOAH MADE THE ARK OF GOPHER WOOD GEN 6:14. The Leaves Of Gopher Trees is a perfect Design Conveying a Special Divine Message. No other Tree in The World Has Such a Message.” Another read: “LADIES ON THIS NATURAL OPERATING TABLE GOD TOOK A RIB FROM ADAM’S SIDE AND MADE MOTHER EVE.” Callaway fascinates me, but so do park visitors. Why would one want to see the Garden of Eden? Hike through it? Did they believe they were seeing and walking through sacred, biblical ground? Seeing where God created Eve? Walking along the same path as Adam? Or, were these visitors like me – simply curious and hoping to enjoy some Florida sunshine? Certainly some of them were. But were all?

The archive photos are from 1953, the same year Joseph Stalin died, the Korean War ended, and Eisenhower entered office. Were they wondering “when will I be blown up” as Faulkner had in 1950? Did a fear of the end of the world make them seek it’s beginning? These are all speculative questions I don’t know the answer to, but questions I wondered while hiking through the garden last Saturday.

Academic conferences are some of my favorite things. This past weekend was the meeting for the American Society of Church History, along with the American Historical Association and the American Catholic Historical Association. I had wonderful meals with my historical peeps and lots of gumbo (not to mention a delicious chocolate bread pudding!). And I attended some wonderful panels too, a few of which I’ll offer some initial thoughts below. Before though, I have to give a huge shout-out to FSU doctoral student Shaun Horton who live-blogged the conference.

Upon getting into NOLA, I made it just in time for the first round of panels, which included an all-star line-up of John Corrigan, Liz Clark, Amanda Porterfield, and Kathryn Lofton in “Restructuring Religion: American Approaches to Modernism.” Corrigan explored the relationship between different ideas about “dead space” in art and ways to analyze religious competition in the modern American period. His idea that a main way religious groups make their identity is by pushing off other groups—especially as space became increasingly scarce—is one that continues to make me try to think through new ways to conceive of the multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and often multi-tension-ridden nineteenth century New Orleans religious milieu. Clark introduced us to Catholic modernist and church historian George LaPiana and Porterfield offered us a new and innovative way to think about William James—as a scholar with a modernist esthetic. In her response, Lofton encouraged us to think about modernism as including the emergence of new subjectivities, always noting how those new subjectivities are concurrent with new modes of thinking and understanding the world, and the process of these two things together. Great way to start the weekend! They were followed by a panel of graduate students speaking about ideas regarding “God’s Kingdom” in supernatural and natural landscapes, which featured ideas about religion and technology, religion and the “free market,” and Sylvester Graham’s theology.

Sylvester Graham folk art-looking embroidery, had nothing to do with the panel, but looks cool

Friday morning, a panel deconstructed the “Mormon monolith” and offered new ways of thinking about Mormon identity in a way that takes the impact of region, race, and gender seriously. That afternoon in his response to a panel that revisited his “Historiographical Heresy: Catholicism as a Model of American Religious History,” (a great panel that featured some of my own scholar buddies like Kelly Baker, Matthew Cressler, and Brian Clites), Jon Butler asserted that he’s not sure something called “American Catholicism” exists. Rather, the diversity of Catholicisms in the country—and the always significant impact of context—makes the idea of a unified Catholicism problematic. The result (at least for me) is further encouragement to really think about what we mean when we say that someone or some group was Catholic. What makes a Catholic a Catholic? How do we draw those boundaries and what do we use? Is a nineteenth-century New Orleans Voudouist who was baptized, attends mass, and conducts Voudou ceremonies a Catholic? Half a Catholic? Kind of Catholic? That night I had a lovely dinner with a small group of other graduate students hosted by Jan Shipps. Attention graduate students: attend the ASCH meeting! You get to go to dinner or lunch with major senior scholars in the field and it’s free (and you learn neat stuff; for example Jan Shipps used to play piano in a bar, a fact that someone should put on her wikipedia page).

St. Augustine Catholic Church, New Orleans, Tomb of the Unknown Slave

Saturday morning brought more Catholics. Mike Pasquier, Matthew Cressler, and myselfpresented papers on black Catholics with the goal of bringing black Catholicism into conversation with the great, new critical scholarship in African American religions (led by folks like Sylvester Johnson, Curtis Evans, and Judith Weisenfeld), by examining the transformation of religious and racial identity over time and space in Black Catholic communities. I discussed the creation of black Catholic parishes in late-nineteenth century New Orleans, Cressler explored Catholic converts in mid-twentieth century Chicago, and Pasquier took us back to the era “before black Catholicism” in messy colonial Louisiana. Themes of the panel included the nature of conversion, locating Catholic identity amidst complicated, creolized religious experience, and the ethnicizing capacity of religion. And though I may be biased, I would say the discussion was rocking, particularly due to the smart comments by respondent Sylvester Johnson. Black Catholics were followed by “Postscripted Presences: Native Christians, Historical Narrative, and Ethnographic Quandaries,” a thought-provoking panel on how to theorize, write, and analyze historical subjects who are embedded in a network of colonialism of both then and now, academic historians and tribal historians, problematic primary sources from European missionary perspectives and (also problematic) oral histories—the result is what panelist Lin Fischer called the “Not-So-Pastness of the Past.” The presentations led to a lively discussion about the pros and cons of historians also doing ethnography. That night, out-going ASCH president Laurie Maffly-Kipp gave her presidential address on “the burdens of church history,” challenging us to think of ideology and institution in new ways. I’ll leave the description at that and simply tell you to look forward to the June issue of ChurchHistory: Studies in Christianity and Culture, which will run a print version of that awesome address.

The well of the samaritan (ca. 1890 Library of Congress)

Sunday morning’s “American Protestant Constructions of the ‘Holy Land,’” was yet another fantastic ASCH panel. Stephanie Stidham Rogers explored the ways in which American Protestants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries imagined the “Holy Land,” particularly as an open, untouched landscape that included timeless people. An indicative travel narrative of the time period included a picture of a contemporary Bedouin woman with the caption “Rachel at the well,” indicating an American imagination that collapsed ideas about time in a place they viewed as timeless. Brooke Sherrard explored the intersections of biblical archaeology and Zionism in the mid-twentieth century. In short, archaeology was never neutral and for these biblical archaeologists, it was also political. Sherrard explained how the way they understood culture impacted how “real” or “true” they took their archaeological finds and how they understood the relationship of Palestine to Israel. Third, Stephanie Brehm took us all to Orlando’s religious theme park, “The Holy Land Experience”—a place of “disneyfied evangetainment.” She explained how education, pilgrimage, entertainment, and worship tangle together in this theme park, which includes a miniature replica of 66 CE Jerusalem and two daily Passion Plays. Consumerism allows park attendees to take some of ancient Israel home with them, be it by purchasing modern-day ceramics and textiles made in Israel or a mezuzah or tallit. What struck me about this panel is how American ideas about the “Holy Land” have contentious relationships to those who currently live there. For Rogers’s American Protestants, the “Holy Land” was one not peopled by contemporary people indigenous to the region; rather, they were understood as people like those from the time of Christ. Attendees of “The Holy Land Experience” leave with souvenirs imported from Israel, that while made in today’s era are associated with 2000 years ago. Again, the people living in Israel and Palestine today seem to be in a way invisible to Americans. Only one of the biblical archaeologists introduced by Sherrard (Millar Burrows) directly spoke about contemporary Palestinians.

Tallit from Holy Land Experience (image taken from Brehm’s master’s thesis)

To wrap up the conference weekend, I went to an AHA panel on jazz, sex, and race in early twentieth century New Orleans, which was followed by fried drum fish before hitting the interstate. All-in-all: a fantastic weekend full of good food, great panels, and even more great discussions (both of the scholarly variety and not) with some of my favorite historical buddies over beer and bourbon.