Evidentiary Boundaries and Improper Interventions
Evidence, Implications, and Illegitimacy in American Religious Studies
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/bsor.v41i4.2Keywords:
zombies, Ku Klux Klan, evidence, American religionsAbstract
What is the evidence of American religions? This article documents how some evidence becomes suspect and illegitimate while other evidence is assumed to be worthy of scholarly trust. The assumed speciousness of popular culture, in this case zombies, as a source and the danger of sources from so-called fringe movements become important venues to problematize preferenced evidence. How is that some religious movements, labeled dangerous, produce evidence that cannot be trusted at face value? Why is there deep concern over the legitimacy of pop culture as a method to study religion? Relying upon Klan print and zombie culture, this article forces the issue of legitimacy and illegitimacy of evidence.
References
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———. 1997. Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Beneke, Chris and Christopher S. Grenda, eds. 2010. The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Bivins, Jason C. 2012. “Only one repertory”: American Religious Studies. Religion 42/3: 395–407.
———. 2008. Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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———. 2002. Inside Organized Racism: Women in the Hate Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press.
———. 2003. “Studying the Enemy.” In Our Studies, Ourselves: Sociologists’ Lives and Work, edited by. Barry Glassner and Rosanna Hertz, 13–23. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 1998. White–Knuckle Research: Emotional Dynamics in Fieldwork with Racist Activists. Qualitative Sociology 21: 381–99.
Blum, Edward. 2005. Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865–1898. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Boyer, Paul. 1992. When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Brown, Wendy. 2006. Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Burlein, Ann. 2002. Lift High the Cross: Where White Supremacy and the Christian Right Converge. Durham: Duke University Press.
Butler, Jon. 2004. J”ack–in–the–Faith: The Religion Problem in Modern American History.” Journal of American History. 90: 1357–78.
Byrne, Julie. 2011. “The Future of American Religion.” In Proceedings: Second Biennial Conference on Religion and American Culture: 62–64. http://www.iupui.edu/~raac/downloads/Proceedings2011.pdf
Callahan Jr., Richard J. 2012. “The study of American religion: looming through the glim.” Religion 42: 425–37.
Caterine, Darryl V. 2011. Haunted Ground: Journeys Through A Paranormal America, Santa Barbara: Praeger.
Chidester, David. 2005. Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.
———. 2003. Salvation and Suicide: Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and Jonestown. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Clifford, James. 1986. “On Ethnographic Allegory. “In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and Georgia Marcus, 98–121. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Clifford, James, and George Marcus, eds. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Corrigan, John. 2009. “Competing and Complementary Approaches in American Religious History. In Proceedings: First Biennial Conference on Religion and American Culture: 12–13. http://www.iupui.edu/~raac/downloads/Proceedings.pdf
Corrigan, John, and Lynn Neal. 2010. Religious Intolerance in America: A Documentary History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Curtis IV, Edward E. and Danielle Brune Sigler, eds. 2009. The New Black Gods: Arthur Huff Fauset and the Study of African American Religions. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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Dobratz, Betty A. and Stephanie L. Shanks–Meile. 2000. “White Power, White Pride!”: The White Separatist Movement in the United States. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Fessenden, Tracy. 2007. Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Frykholm, Amy Johnson. 2007. Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gilderhus, Mark T. 2000. History and Historians: A Historiographical Introduction. 4th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Glassner, Barry and Rosanna Hertz, eds. 2003. Our Studies, Ourselves: Sociologists’ Lives and Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gordon, Avery. 2008. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Minneapois: University of Minnesota Press. Kindle edition.
Griffith, R. Marie. 2004. Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Fessenden, Tracy. 2007. Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
———. 2012. The Objects of American Religious Studies. Religion 42: 373–82.
Hall, David D., ed. 1997. Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Hutchison, William R. 2003. Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Ingebretsen, Edward. 2001. At Stake: Monsters and the Rhetoric of Fear in Public Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Johnson, Sylvester. 2009. “Religion Proper and Proper Religion: Arthur Fauset and the Study of African American Religions.” In The New Black Gods: Arthur Huff Fauset and the Study of African American Religions,edited by Edward E. Curtis IV and Danielle Brune Sigler, 145–70. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Koehlinger, Amy L. 2007. The New Nuns: Racial Justice and Religious Reform in the 1960s. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Kristeva, Julia. 1982. The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.
Laderman, Gary. 2009. Sacred Matters: Celebrity Worship, Sexual Ecstasies, the Living Dead, and Other Signs of Religious Life in the United States. New York: The New Press.
Levene, Nancy K. 2006. “Sources of History: Myth and Image. “Journal of the American Academy of Religion 74:79–101.
Lofton, Kathryn. 2011. Oprah: A Gospel of an Icon. Berkeley: University of California Press.
———. 2012. “Religious history as Religious Studies. “Religion 42: 383–94.
Livingston, James. 2007. “On Richard Hofstadter and the Politics of ‘Consensus History.’ “ boundary 2 34: 33–46.
Mason, Patrick Q. 2011. The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti–Mormonism in the Postbellum South. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McCloud, Sean. 2007. Divine Hierarchies: Class in American Religion & Religious Studies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
McCutcheon, Russell T. 2006. “ ‘It’s A Lie. There’s No Truth in It! It’s a Sin’: On the Limits of the Humanistic Study of Religion and the Cost of Saving Others from Themselves.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76: 720–50.
Metcalf, Peter. 2002. They Lie, We Lie: Getting on with Anthropology. London: Routledge.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2011. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham: Duke University Press.
Modern, John Lardas. 2012. “My Evangelical Conviction.” Religion 42: 439–57.
Nabhan-Warren, Kristy. 2005. The Virgin of El Barrio: Marian Apparitions, Catholic Evangelizing and Mexican American Activism. New York: New York University Press.
Neal, Lynn S. 2009. “Christianizing the Klan: Alma White, Branford Clark, and the Art of Religious Intolerance.” Church History 78: 350–78.
———. 2006. Romancing God: Evangelical Women and Inspirational Fiction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Novick, Peter. 1988. That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Orsi, Robert A. 2004. Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
———. 2009. “Competing and Complementary Approaches in American Religious History.” In Proceedings: First Biennial Conference on Religion and American Culture: 16–17. http://www.iupui.edu/~raac/downloads/Proceedings.pdf
———. 1997. “Everyday Miracles: The Study of Lived Religion. “In Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice., edited David D. Hall. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
———. 1996. Thank You, St. Jude: Women’s Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Scarry, Elaine. 1986. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press.
Schneider, Nathan. 2011. “What is Oprah?: An Interview with Kathryn Lofton.” The Immanent Frame. http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2011/01/26/what–is–oprah–an–interview–with–kathryn–lofton/
Schultz, Kevin M. and Paul Harvey. 2010. “Everywhere and Nowhere: Recent Trends in American Religious History and Historiography.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion. 78: 129–62.
Scott, Joan W. 1991. “The Evidence of Experience.”Critical Inquiry 17: 773–97.
———. 2001. “Fantasy Echo: History and the Construction of Identity. “Critical Inquiry 27: 284–304.
Spikard, James V. 2002. “On the Epistemology of Post–Colonial Ethnography. “In Personal Knowledge and Beyond: Reshaping the Ethnography of Religion. Edited by James V. Spikard, . Shawn Landres, and Meredith B. McGuire, 237–52. New York: New York University Press.
Spikard, James V., J. Shawn Landres and Meredith B. McGuire, eds. 2002. Personal Knowledge and Beyond: Reshaping the Ethnography of Religion. New York: New York University Press.
Smith, Jonathan Z. 1982. Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Stewart, Kathleen. 1991. O”n the Politics of Cultural Theory: A Case for ‘Contaminated’ Cultural Critique.” Social Research 58: 395–412.
———. 1996. Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an “Other” America. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Sturken, Marita. 2007. Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero. Durham: Duke University Press.
Tweed, Thomas. 2010. “Expanding the Study of U.S. Religion: Reflections on the State of a Subfield. “Religion 40: 250–58.
———, ed. 1997. Retelling U.S. Religious History. Berkley: University of California Press.
Watt, David Harrington. 2002. Bible–Carrying Christians: Conservative Protestants and Social Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Weisenfeld, Judith. 2007. Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929–1949. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Wenger, Tisa. 2009. We Have A Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Appleby, Joyce, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob. 1994. Telling the Truth About History. New York: W.W. Norton.
Baker, Kelly J. 2011. Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915–1930. CultureAmerica. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.
Barkun, Michael. 2003. A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America. Berkeley: University of California Press
———. 1997. Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Beneke, Chris and Christopher S. Grenda, eds. 2010. The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Bivins, Jason C. 2012. “Only one repertory”: American Religious Studies. Religion 42/3: 395–407.
———. 2008. Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Blee, Kathleen M. 1993. “Evidence, Empathy, and Ethics: Lessons from Oral Histories of the Klan.” Journal of American History 80/ 2: 596–606.
———. 2002. Inside Organized Racism: Women in the Hate Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press.
———. 2003. “Studying the Enemy.” In Our Studies, Ourselves: Sociologists’ Lives and Work, edited by. Barry Glassner and Rosanna Hertz, 13–23. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 1998. White–Knuckle Research: Emotional Dynamics in Fieldwork with Racist Activists. Qualitative Sociology 21: 381–99.
Blum, Edward. 2005. Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865–1898. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Boyer, Paul. 1992. When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Brown, Wendy. 2006. Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Burlein, Ann. 2002. Lift High the Cross: Where White Supremacy and the Christian Right Converge. Durham: Duke University Press.
Butler, Jon. 2004. J”ack–in–the–Faith: The Religion Problem in Modern American History.” Journal of American History. 90: 1357–78.
Byrne, Julie. 2011. “The Future of American Religion.” In Proceedings: Second Biennial Conference on Religion and American Culture: 62–64. http://www.iupui.edu/~raac/downloads/Proceedings2011.pdf
Callahan Jr., Richard J. 2012. “The study of American religion: looming through the glim.” Religion 42: 425–37.
Caterine, Darryl V. 2011. Haunted Ground: Journeys Through A Paranormal America, Santa Barbara: Praeger.
Chidester, David. 2005. Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.
———. 2003. Salvation and Suicide: Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and Jonestown. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Clifford, James. 1986. “On Ethnographic Allegory. “In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and Georgia Marcus, 98–121. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Clifford, James, and George Marcus, eds. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Corrigan, John. 2009. “Competing and Complementary Approaches in American Religious History. In Proceedings: First Biennial Conference on Religion and American Culture: 12–13. http://www.iupui.edu/~raac/downloads/Proceedings.pdf
Corrigan, John, and Lynn Neal. 2010. Religious Intolerance in America: A Documentary History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Curtis IV, Edward E. and Danielle Brune Sigler, eds. 2009. The New Black Gods: Arthur Huff Fauset and the Study of African American Religions. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Curtis, Finbarr. 2012. The study of American Religions: Critical Reflections on a Specialization.” Religion 42: 355–72.
Dobratz, Betty A. and Stephanie L. Shanks–Meile. 2000. “White Power, White Pride!”: The White Separatist Movement in the United States. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Fessenden, Tracy. 2007. Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Frykholm, Amy Johnson. 2007. Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gilderhus, Mark T. 2000. History and Historians: A Historiographical Introduction. 4th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Glassner, Barry and Rosanna Hertz, eds. 2003. Our Studies, Ourselves: Sociologists’ Lives and Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gordon, Avery. 2008. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Minneapois: University of Minnesota Press. Kindle edition.
Griffith, R. Marie. 2004. Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Fessenden, Tracy. 2007. Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
———. 2012. The Objects of American Religious Studies. Religion 42: 373–82.
Hall, David D., ed. 1997. Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Hutchison, William R. 2003. Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Ingebretsen, Edward. 2001. At Stake: Monsters and the Rhetoric of Fear in Public Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Johnson, Sylvester. 2009. “Religion Proper and Proper Religion: Arthur Fauset and the Study of African American Religions.” In The New Black Gods: Arthur Huff Fauset and the Study of African American Religions,edited by Edward E. Curtis IV and Danielle Brune Sigler, 145–70. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Koehlinger, Amy L. 2007. The New Nuns: Racial Justice and Religious Reform in the 1960s. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Kristeva, Julia. 1982. The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.
Laderman, Gary. 2009. Sacred Matters: Celebrity Worship, Sexual Ecstasies, the Living Dead, and Other Signs of Religious Life in the United States. New York: The New Press.
Levene, Nancy K. 2006. “Sources of History: Myth and Image. “Journal of the American Academy of Religion 74:79–101.
Lofton, Kathryn. 2011. Oprah: A Gospel of an Icon. Berkeley: University of California Press.
———. 2012. “Religious history as Religious Studies. “Religion 42: 383–94.
Livingston, James. 2007. “On Richard Hofstadter and the Politics of ‘Consensus History.’ “ boundary 2 34: 33–46.
Mason, Patrick Q. 2011. The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti–Mormonism in the Postbellum South. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McCloud, Sean. 2007. Divine Hierarchies: Class in American Religion & Religious Studies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
McCutcheon, Russell T. 2006. “ ‘It’s A Lie. There’s No Truth in It! It’s a Sin’: On the Limits of the Humanistic Study of Religion and the Cost of Saving Others from Themselves.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76: 720–50.
Metcalf, Peter. 2002. They Lie, We Lie: Getting on with Anthropology. London: Routledge.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2011. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham: Duke University Press.
Modern, John Lardas. 2012. “My Evangelical Conviction.” Religion 42: 439–57.
Nabhan-Warren, Kristy. 2005. The Virgin of El Barrio: Marian Apparitions, Catholic Evangelizing and Mexican American Activism. New York: New York University Press.
Neal, Lynn S. 2009. “Christianizing the Klan: Alma White, Branford Clark, and the Art of Religious Intolerance.” Church History 78: 350–78.
———. 2006. Romancing God: Evangelical Women and Inspirational Fiction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Novick, Peter. 1988. That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Orsi, Robert A. 2004. Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
———. 2009. “Competing and Complementary Approaches in American Religious History.” In Proceedings: First Biennial Conference on Religion and American Culture: 16–17. http://www.iupui.edu/~raac/downloads/Proceedings.pdf
———. 1997. “Everyday Miracles: The Study of Lived Religion. “In Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice., edited David D. Hall. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
———. 1996. Thank You, St. Jude: Women’s Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Scarry, Elaine. 1986. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press.
Schneider, Nathan. 2011. “What is Oprah?: An Interview with Kathryn Lofton.” The Immanent Frame. http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2011/01/26/what–is–oprah–an–interview–with–kathryn–lofton/
Schultz, Kevin M. and Paul Harvey. 2010. “Everywhere and Nowhere: Recent Trends in American Religious History and Historiography.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion. 78: 129–62.
Scott, Joan W. 1991. “The Evidence of Experience.”Critical Inquiry 17: 773–97.
———. 2001. “Fantasy Echo: History and the Construction of Identity. “Critical Inquiry 27: 284–304.
Spikard, James V. 2002. “On the Epistemology of Post–Colonial Ethnography. “In Personal Knowledge and Beyond: Reshaping the Ethnography of Religion. Edited by James V. Spikard, . Shawn Landres, and Meredith B. McGuire, 237–52. New York: New York University Press.
Spikard, James V., J. Shawn Landres and Meredith B. McGuire, eds. 2002. Personal Knowledge and Beyond: Reshaping the Ethnography of Religion. New York: New York University Press.
Smith, Jonathan Z. 1982. Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Stewart, Kathleen. 1991. O”n the Politics of Cultural Theory: A Case for ‘Contaminated’ Cultural Critique.” Social Research 58: 395–412.
———. 1996. Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an “Other” America. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Sturken, Marita. 2007. Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero. Durham: Duke University Press.
Tweed, Thomas. 2010. “Expanding the Study of U.S. Religion: Reflections on the State of a Subfield. “Religion 40: 250–58.
———, ed. 1997. Retelling U.S. Religious History. Berkley: University of California Press.
Watt, David Harrington. 2002. Bible–Carrying Christians: Conservative Protestants and Social Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Weisenfeld, Judith. 2007. Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929–1949. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Wenger, Tisa. 2009. We Have A Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Published
2012-12-03
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Baker, K. (2012). Evidentiary Boundaries and Improper Interventions: Evidence, Implications, and Illegitimacy in American Religious Studies. Bulletin for the Study of Religion, 41(4), 2-11. https://doi.org/10.1558/bsor.v41i4.2
