Whig Hill

Goals, week 11

Plowed through some basic editing on chapter 2 today, so I can mark that off my list from last week. This week, I need to…

Find an illustrative anecdote to open the chapter.

Fill in some small gaps. For instance, I need a paragraph on Strong’s critique of wealth, and some explanatory stuff on young overseers (from Scarborough) and religion in Mississippi (from Sparks). The large gaps will have to wait.

Straighten out and format the citations.

Write a summary/conclusion for this chapter. That is hindered by the fact that I’m still unsure of what this chapter is about. I mean, it’s all over the place. I’ve got a discussion of “discipline,” and description of church courts (where the largest gap is), a narrative and slight analysis of the Wesleyan episode, and a discussion of the “temperance reform” that is rather tepid. This is followed by Flintoff’s not-so-excellent adventures in Mississippi, and Strong Thomasson’s oddball view of the world. None of these things would seem to have anything to do with any other.

I actually do know what this is about, I’m just not confident that what I have down on paper is expressing this. It is about how religious practice shapes behavior of people toward social groups and the secular world.* Discipline in general and church courts in particular are the practice and in them we can see how an evangelical sensibility is articulated and prescribed. In the Wesleyan episode and the temperance movement, we can see how that evangelical sensibility reacted to secular social tension. (It aggressively entered the secular world, but had limitations.) That evangelical sensibility motivated individuals—especially the majority who did not tangle with their churches—in ways different from how it motivated group action. Thus, the Flintoff and Thomasson sections. They don’t talk about church courts, discipline, Wesleyans (slavery), and temperance (well, Strong did on that one), but they still experienced and enacted (sorry) the tenets of that evangelical sensibility in their lives. It’s a different perspective on the same thing.

*This is supposed to be a bit more specific than my usual refrain that I am looking at how religious practice shapes social behavior.

Ok, I feel better for having written that out. Now I got to go make three or four pages out of it.

I am really looking forward to finishing this (for now), and moving on to the next chapter (which is actually the first chapter.) And talking to you about it.

Summary, week 10

This is going to sound strange, but these Methodists are getting rather hard to find. I’ll admit to being stumped. Specifically, I don’t know where their church records are located, if anywhere. Yeah, the United Methodist Church records for the North Carolina Conference are at Duke, but that contains conference and circuit minutes, not actual church meeting minutes. It’s a hierarchy thing, with churches being lowest in order. In contrast, Wake Forest has records for Baptist churches.

Anyhow, spent part of the day at Duke pretty much wasting my time. Spent the other half of the day at a local graduate history conference talking about Strong and Caroline and thinking about where to pitch an article. (Now that I think about it, this was my first official outing with Caroline, only sixteen years after first laying eyes on her. Kind of a milestone, actually.)

Made some progress this week on editing chapter 2, but didn’t finish, as expected. I am still a bit frustrated in finding a way to talk about this discipline stuff, and suspect this will be a weak link in the dissertation, because I need to get a move on. (But, it will be a perfect topic to develop in a post-doc fellowship, is what I’m thinking. I wish.)

Speaking of "the southern Methodist man," I need to read this.

Next week is spring break for the four-year college, so I might get something done.

Goals, week 10

No goals this week, except to finish revisions on this draft chapter. But I've got a set of papers and exams to grade and a conference paper to revise, so I'm not sure I'll even get to the dissertation this week. Instead, I'm going to toss out an incoherent response to a comment a friend left on the las post.

"What is interesting in your case is that there is no state or church actor that can wield violence against those who do not keep discipline. What are the structures of discipline in your case? How does this work when the only consequence of failing to maintain discipline in social ostracism?"

Hey, thanks for the response, and the tips. You are right, that in the United States in the nineteenth century no established, or otherwise universal, church existed that might reinforce religious discipline with legal sanction. The medieval Roman Catholic Church, and even the early Church of England could strip people of legal rights for transgressions of doctrine. Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians and the other denominations in the American south did not have that kind of power. The worst thing a church could do was expel a member. The thing is…with the proliferation of so many denominations; a disaffected member might simply change to another church if they really wished to remain in one. But no secular-world punishment existed. Ministers and church elders recognized the “voluntary” nature of congregations, and thus church court actions tended to be drawn out affairs that emphasized reconciliation over excommunication.

I don’t think social ostracism was a serious concern for excommunicated members. I mean, I’ve never seen an example of a person being “shunned” to the point of “social death.” The moral authority of churches undoubtedly lost ground because of this lack of power. It seems, however, that excommunicated people tended to remain part of a larger social community based on familial, political, social, or economic networks of a place. A reputation might have been harmed, but social presence wasn’t.

Discipline still had power. First, in the vast number of recalcitrants who were brought back into communion (not expelled) by the action of church courts. More importantly, to remain in communion and in peace meant assurance of salvation. The yearnings of a soul and the rectifying power of desire are very difficult to quantify in the way we might chart the expulsion of church members for drunkenness and sexual impropriety, but the power to alter or create social behavior is evident in the way people struggled with issues of infidelity. No observant, or informal, Christian wanted to risk eternal death by being the subject of disciplinary action.

Since I came to religious history through a back door, I’m not very strong on religious/sociological theory, thus all this is kind of blind groping on my part. I’ve got a Durkheim book cracked open on my coffee table, but haven’t made the progress on it I need to, just for starters.

Summary week 9

Ok, so revising this section of the chapter has been…not easy. In fifteen pages I had some good ideas, but it was a jumble, and the good ideas struggled (are still struggling) to get out. Lots of deleting, moving things around, writing new transitions, and clarifying topic sentences. And I didn’t have much time this week because of teaching and doing other kinds of non-dissertation-related historian business.

My chief problem remains this: I’m dealing with some abstract ideas that I haven’t mastered yet. My main point is about religious discipline. Now, what I mean is how does religious practice determine social behavior (in a world with competing ethics). So, social behavior is my main, main, point. But religious discipline requires the most definition and analysis. Coupled with this is a need to state up front that by religious discipline, I do not mean church courts, which is what most folks think of when I say discipline.

(I purposefully made that paragraph baffling to demonstrate how confusing it is to me. Yeah, that’s it.)

So I got that mostly straightened out for now, and am ready to go into the next section: how discipline and social behavior interacted in the world. That should be the subject of my goals for tomorrow.

This makes sense

This makes sense if you consider the larger context of a fast-developing right-wing counternarrative to American history. In it, Southern slaveholders, because they were slaveholders, were the left-wing social engineers (proto-socialists) of the day. They wanted to control people, just like Stalin and Hitler wanted to control people. In this scenario, the heroic actors are the orthodox evangelicals (proto-Reaganites) who defeated the slaveowning heretics, using scriptural truth. Somehow, the north both won and lost the war (well, they got that one kind of right), as the post-war period marked the ascendency of Lenin/Alinsky/Obama axis that worked/s to re-enslave Americans. You see… welfare is just like slavery. Just like it.

This is the same historiographical circle that brands Woodrow Wilson the original Commie/Nazi and the Civil Rights Movement as the triumph of conservative logic.  (They also imagine the Confederate army a shining beacon of multiculturalism.)

Kind of makes sense, except that it doesn’t.

Goals, week 9

Thought I had finished with Strong for the week, but I was wrong. I met someone Friday who also knows Thomasson quite well and we talked a bit, then I spent the rest of the weekend channeling him at Island Farm.

Anyhow, this week’s goal is to begin revision on Chapter 2. The first section is rather disjointed, going from church courts to temperance to the Wesleyan episode, all in an effort to more broadly define “discipline.” I think the first is inadequate, the second unoriginal, and the third downright awkward. But these things tend to be worse in my memory than in fact, so perhaps it will all make sense when I go back. One thing I know is true is that I’ve got to do a much better job of analytics, especially talking about my meaning of discipline.

Another short one. See you Friday, or whenever. I’ll try to have something substantial then.

Summary, week 8

Doing this now because I’ll be off the grid, sort of, all weekend, starting tomorrow. So this is just a quick note. You’re welcome.

Just now finished the Strong Thomasson section. Very drafty, of course, but it proceeds along the lines I’ve speculated on here. I’m starting to like it, even if it’s only eleven pages at this point. What a funny and strange little fellow.

Regarding the Speer diaries and I’m still not sure. The thing is, though economically ordinary (not wealthy), they’re not following the ordinary path: they didn’t get married, one taught at Greensboro Female and attended Mount Holyoke, and confined their writing (so far as I’ve read), to spiritual concerns. Jennie is really rather ordinary in her religious thinking (kind of a Methodist Perfectionist, Sidney Bumpass-style), but does not enact it in the social setting I’m trying to focus on. (Annie’s diary hasn’t been introduced as far as I’ve gotten yet.) There is quite a bit of useful stuff: their reading habits, their sensibilities, their crazy-ass brother… Hell, their father spoke at a temperance meeting with Strong in attendance. They’re going to make it in, I’m just not sure they’re going to get their own section.

Well… I released all my classes way-early this week. I’ll do the same for you.

See ya’ Sunday.