Thomas Paine is My Spirit Animal: A Preview of Comments on Porterfield's Conceived in Doubt #AHA2014 #ASCH14

I stand here today with Thomas Pain as my muse. A skeptic. Pain is more than my muse. He is my spirit animal. I picked up Amanda Porterfield’s wonderful book in the midst of my own crisis of doubt. In the midst of my own skeptical turn. It was a very Tom Panian mood. While the field of American religious history continues to churn out well written and rigorously researched work, I had begin to wonder if all of our energies weren’t just variations on a single theme and I was losing my belief in that theme. I was growing skeptical of American religious history.

About a year ago I was having coffee with an American religious historian I greatly admire. We were discussing how we imagined ourselves, our work, and our audience. This historian looked at me at one point and said something to the effect of, “I wanted to show historians that religion is a powerful force. That it does stuff.” Religion does stuff. Isn’t this the theme of our subfield? I don’t walk the halls of a history department but I imagine this is what the religious historian says to their Marxist colleagues. I don’t walk the halls of divinity schools either, but I imagine it’s what church historians tell future church leaders. Religion is not epiphenomenal. It is not simply a mask for politics or capital. It does stuff.

For example, in their 2010 article in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, titled “Everywhere and Nowhere,” Paul Harvey and Kevin Schultz described the ways historians of American religions have “found the persistence, continuity, and adaptability of American religion an impressive, motivating, guiding, and ever shape-shifting specter,” (p.131).  Motivating. Guiding. Shape-shifting. So many verbals. Because religion does stuff, right? Religion guides, motivates, adapts, continues, persists, right?

Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe those moments of persistence, guidance, motivation, and continuity are actually the moments where religion itself gets constructed. Maybe it’s shape-shifting because it is constantly being rebuilt. But by who? And to what end? These were the questions driving my skepticism.

“Religion came to designate a diffuse realm, protected by the state, where people built communities, conceived relationships with God, and lamented the corruption of the state and of profane, mistrustful society,” Amanda Porterfield wrote (p.12). Here religion does nothing. People build, conceive, and lament and in that process they build a diffuse realm they call religion. And so, as she closes her introduction, Porterfield stoked my skepticism. Religion is not an agent, it is not a force, it is not a motivator. It is a realm, a category, a way of cordoning off this and not that. It is a product of distinctions and combinations.

In my reading, Porterfield’s most important contribution to American religious history is the shift from arguing that religion does stuff to an argument about how religion became a “diffuse realm” that Americans distinguished from the political and the profane. It is a shift from descriptivism to constructivism—a shift from looking for religion and seeing what it does to tracing out how Americans built this category they called religion.

So, allow me to quickly outline a few examples from Porterfield’s book that will add some clarity to what have been abstract comments thus far. I see this shift from what religion does to how religion came to be in three places: evangelicals’ relationships with their others, disputes over true religion, and the function of male honor. In each to these cases Porterfield does not attempt to prove that religion is doing something. Rather, she pays particular attention to how Americans distinguished religion or evangelical religion and how these acts of distinction, difference, and boundary maintenance shaped the realms of religion and politics.