Religion in the American Experience

Lodged firmly in the American psyche and a bedrock part of American history, is the Great Depression. Beginning with the stock market crash in October of 1929 - the market lost 50% of its value in weeks - and lasting a decade, it was the worst calamity to hit the United States since the Civil War. Unemployment soared, many lost hope, hunger stalked individuals and families, farms went under, long bread lines formed, people up and left their homes for a better place, and poverty skyrocketed.

For us, the question is, in what ways did religion – one of the greatest and most ubiquitous forces in our history – react to the Great Depression? Understanding this will help us better comprehend and perpetuate the American project, including the religion clauses in the U.S. Constitution: “Congress shall make no longer law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof.”

As part of our multi-episode series about religion in the Great Depression, Dr. Randall Stephens is joining us to talk about the Protestant response to the Dust Bowl.

Dr. Randall J. Stephens is professor of American and British Studies at the University of Oslo. He previously taught at Northumbria University (Newcastle upon Tyne) and Eastern Nazarene College (Quincy, Massachusetts). He is a historian of religion, conservatism, the South, environmentalism, and popular culture and is the author of several books including The Fire Spreads: Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South and The Devil’s Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock ’n’ Roll , (look for a “Religion in the American Experience” episode focused on this fascinating topic!) and was editor of Recent Themes in American Religious History. Specific to our discussion today, he is the author of an article that came out in the October 2023 issue of Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture: “The Dust Bowl, the Depression, and American Protestant Responses to Environmental Devastation.” In 2011-12, he was a Fulbright Roving Scholar in Norway. Dr. Stephens received his BA in History at Mid America Nazarene College and his PhD in American History from the University of Florida.

Another episode in the subseries "The Making of US: Lived Religion in America", our effort to document everyday Americans' religious histories. Today Arshan Khalid of Washington, D.C. shares with us his own deep, rich personal religious history.

Lodged firmly in the American psyche and a bedrock part of American history, is the Great Depression. Beginning with the stock market crash in October of 1929 - the market lost 50% of its value in weeks - and lasting a decade, it was the worst calamity to hit the United States since the Civil War. Unemployment soared, farms went under, long bread lines formed, people up and left their homes for a better place, and poverty skyrocketed. The emotional toll on millions was just as severe.

For us, the question is, in what ways did religion – one of the greatest and most ubiquitous forces in our history – react to the Great Depression? Understanding this will help us better comprehend and perpetuate the American project, including the religion clauses in the U.S. Constitution: "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States" and “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof.” 

As part of our multi-episode series about religion in the Great Depression, Dr. Alison Greene and Dr. Randall Stephens are joining us to talk about the story of FDR’s clergy letters.

Dr. Alison Collis Greene is Associate Professor of American Religious History at Candler School of Theology at Emory University and is an affiliated faculty member in the Department of History at Emory College of Arts and Sciences. She teaches United States religious history, with interests in American religions as they relate to politics, wealth and poverty, race and ethnicity, the environment, and the modern rural South. She is author of No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta, as well as a number of essays and articles on modern United States religious history in both scholarly and popular outlets. Dr. Greene is also on the editorial board of the Journal of Southern Religion.

Dr. Randall J. Stephens is professor of American and British Studies at the University of Oslo. He is a historian of religion, conservatism, the South, environmentalism, and popular culture and is the author of several books including The Fire Spreads: Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South and The Devil's Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock 'n' Roll, and was editor of Recent Themes in American Religious History. Specific to our discussion today, he is the author of an article that came out in the October 2023 issue of Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture: “The Dust Bowl, the Depression, and American Protestant Responses to Environmental Devastation.”

Another episode in the subseries "The Making of US: Lived Religion in America", our effort to document everyday Americans' religious histories. Today Andy Berger of Cincinnati, Ohio shares with us his own deep and rich personal religious history.

As part of our multi-episode series about Pentecostalism – a relatively unknown and perhaps misunderstood, fast growing, and very large part of Christianity, we will be exploring Pentecostalism and its support of Donald Trump between 2016 and 2022.

Valerie Cooper is associate professor of religion and society and black church studies at Duke Divinity School. Using historical and theological methodologies, her wide-ranging scholarship examines issues of religion, race, politics, and popular culture. She has published essays on African American evangelicals (particularly in Pentecostalism and the Holiness Movement), on African Americans’ use of the Bible, and with political scientist Corwin Smidt, co-authored an essay on the roles of religion and race in the 2008 election of President Barack Obama. Her article on “Black Theology” is forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of Political Theology.

Her book, Word, Like Fire: Maria Stewart, the Bible, and the Rights of African Americans, analyzes the role of biblical hermeneutics in the thought of Maria Stewart, a pioneering 19th-century African American woman theologian and political speaker. Cooper is currently working on Segregated Sundays, a book evaluating the successes and failures of the racial reconciliation efforts of Christian congregations and ministries from the 1990s to the present.

Dale Coulter is an ordained minister in the Church of God (Cleveland, TN) and professor of historical theology at Pentecostal Theological Seminary. He studied the Middle Ages while completing his DPhil at the University of Oxford. Much of his work has centered on the twelfth century abbey of St. Victor, having published a monograph on Richard of St. Victor. His most recent work is a collection of essays he co-edited titled, The Spirit, the Affections, and the Christian Tradition. He has authored a popular work on holiness and occasionally writes at the online platform for the journal First Things, which is published by the Institute for Religion and Public Life. He has also written articles for outlets such as The Washington Post, Christianity Today, The Stream, Keryx, and Seed Bed. He is a past president of the Society for Pentecostal Studies. Dale has also served as co-editor of PNEUMA: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies (2010-2015) and currently serves on its editorial board. He is also involved in ecumenical discussions between Orthodox and Pentecostals as well as a participating member of Evangelicals and Catholics Together. 

Another episode in the subseries "The Making of US: Lived Religion in America", our effort to document everyday Americans' religious histories. Today Debbie Richard Johns of Loudoun County, Virginia shares with us her own deep and rich personal religious history.

Lodged firmly in the American psyche and a bedrock part of American history, is the Great Depression. Beginning with the stock market crash in October of 1929 - the market lost 50% of its value in weeks - and lasting a decade, it was the worst calamity to hit the United States since the Civil War. Unemployment soared, farms went under, long bread lines formed, people up and left their homes for a better place, and poverty skyrocketed. The emotional toll on millions was just as severe.

For us the question is, in what ways did religion – one of the greatest and most ubiquitous forces in American history – react to the Great Depression? Understanding this will help us comprehend religion’s role in the American project, equipping us to be perpetuate and perfect it more successfully into the 21st century.

As part of our multi-episode series about religion in the Great Depression, Dr. Alison Greene is here to help us understand how the Depression and the New Deal changed the southern Protestant establishment in the Mississippi Delta region. It is a fascinating story.

Dr. Alison Collis Greene is Associate Professor of American Religious History at Candler School of Theology at Emory University, and is an affiliated faculty member in the Department of History at Emory College of Arts and Sciences. She teaches United States religious history, with interests in American religions as they relate to politics, wealth and poverty, race and ethnicity, the environment, and the modern rural South. She is author of No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta (Oxford, 2016), as well as a number of essays and articles on modern United States religious history in both scholarly and popular outlets. Dr. Greene is also on the editorial board of the Journal of Southern Religion.

Who is Thomas Jefferson? He is the author of the Declaration of Independence, third president of the United States, founder of the University of Virginia, slaveholder, has a monument in Washington DC and his face on our five-cent coin, and is one of the four presidents carved in stone at Mt. Rushmore – along with George Washington, Teddy Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln. He has also been called the American Sphinx, because a complete understanding of him has been somewhat elusive. For the National Museum of American Religion our questions are these: what was Thomas Jefferson’s religion and what impact did it have on him personally and on his public actions? Answers to these questions will give us a better understanding of Jefferson and the American project he helped establish and equip us to help guide the American experiment in self-government successfully through the 21st century.

To answer these and related questions, Tommy Kidd is here with us! Dr. Thomas S. Kidd is research professor of church history at Midwestern Baptist Seminary in Kansas City, and a senior research scholar at Baylor University's Institute for Studies of Religion. Kidd completed a Ph.D. in history at the University of Notre Dame, where he worked with the historian of religion George Marsden. He received a B.A. and M.A. at Clemson University. He is a prolific author and has written, among other books, Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Spirit and Flesh – the focus of today’s interview; Baptists in America: A History (with Barry Hankins), George Whitefield: America’s Spiritual Founding Father, and American Christians and Islam. He has written for outlets including the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. Dr. Kidd teaches courses on colonial America, the American Revolution, and American religious history.

Iowa is lodged firmly in the American psyche as a place of traditional American values – hard work, family, and religion. Iowa is an important player in the United States’ vaunted agricultural industry, having been ranked first in the country in soybean production, corn production, and pork production. America has also slowly learned over the past decade, with ICE raids and COVID, is that a significant number of immigrants and refugees do the difficult and hazardous work of slaughtering and processing the meat products we purchase at our local grocery store. What is of interest to us at the National Museum of American Religion is whether religion plays critical roles in the lives of these workers, and if so, how.

To help us understand this, we have with us today Kristy Nabhan-Warren, Professor and the inaugural V.O. and Elizabeth Kahl Figge Chair in Catholic Studies at the University of Iowa, and author of Meatpacking America: How Migration, Work and Faith Unite and Divide the Heartland. Kristy received her PhD from the University of Indiana; her research interests include American Religions; Ethnographic approaches to the study of religion; Catholic Studies; Latinx Studies. She is committed to making scholarship meaningful to non-academics as well as academics, and prides herself on writing for a wide audience. She works hard to stay true to her working class and Midwestern roots. She embraces a Humanities for the Public Good approach to her research, writing, and dissemination of information.

Martin Luther King is a larger-than-life character in the American narrative, playing a pivotal role in the nation’s mid-twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement. His “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC in August of 1963 as part of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom is an integral part of Americans’ understanding of him and the Civil Rights Movement. However, talking about receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 he said, “I am a minister of the gospel, not a political leader”, suggesting there is more, much more, to him than “I have a dream.” This podcast episode is going to explore the religion of Martin Luther King, what it was, how it formed him, inspired him, burdened him, and animated him.

Today’s guest who will help us do this, is Paul Harvey, Distinguished Professor History and Presidential Teaching Scholar at University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. He researches, writes, and teaches in the field of American history from the 16th century to the present. Paul is the author of Martin Luther King: A Religious Life, Howard Thurman and the Disinherited: A Religious Biography, Christianity and Race in the American South: A History, and Bounds of Their Habitation: Religion and Race in American History. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.