The Genesis of Jesus Rock: An Interview with David W. Stowe

[Crossposted at Religion in American History]

Randall Stephens

David W. Stowe is a professor of American Studies and Religious Studies at Michigan State University. He has written on jazz history, hymns, and rock music. Stowe is the author of a wide range of books and articles, including Swing Changes: Big-Band Jazz in New Deal America (Harvard University Press, 1996); How Sweet the Sound: Music in the Spiritual Lives of Americans (Harvard University Press, 2004); and, most recently, No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism (Harvard University Press, 2011). Below I interview Stowe about his excellent new book and his insights into Jesus rock and the culture of conservative evangelicalism.

Randall Stephens: What drew you to the topic of the roots of Christian rock?

David W. Stowe: I was intrigued by the historical moment of the early Seventies—1971 to be exact—when it seemed popular music and youth culture were saturated in allusions to Jesus Christ: Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar, several Top 40 songs with Jesus in their titles or verses. Why had the Son of God seemingly taken over U.S. popular culture at just that moment—when the countercultural energies of the Sixties were metamorphosing into something new? And did this music play some role in reshaping American culture during the Age of Reagan and beyond?

These struck me as questions worth trying to answer. There was a personal angle as well. I came of age during the Seventies and have always been fascinated by that decade, which I remember now as if it were some kind of dream. So Christian pop music—of which I was completely oblivious until about 15 years ago—was a lens through which to make sense of that strange interlude between Kent State and the Reagan Revolution.

Stephens: Why did a Christian analogue to rock music develop when and where it did?

Stowe: Like many forms of the Sixties counterculture, Christian rock first emerged in California. More precisely Orange County, the epicenter of what was dubbed the Jesus Movement. It was at Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa where Chuck Smith famously teamed up with über-Jesus freak Lonnie Frisbee. Larry Norman came out of the Bay Area and had a major impact as well. But it’s important to note that the West Coast didn’t have a monopoly on Jesus music. The Rez Band (still in business) originated in

Milwaukee and made a very successful debut run across the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. CCM guitar hero Phil Keaggy did a stint at Love Inn in upstate New York. [Check out the McCartney, Ram-esque Keaggy song in the youtube clip here.] So this Jesus Movement—and the music that went with it—was a national phenomenon.

Stephens: You focus quite a bit of attention on apocalypticism. How did end-times views shape Christian rock and, even, politics?

Stowe: Apocalyptic themes had bounced around in American pop music since early Dylan—“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”—and Barry McGuire’s surprise number-one hit of 1965, “Eve of Destruction.” A sense of living in end times tinged the late Sixties counterculture—a certain Cold War fatalism permeated American society for decades--so it made sense that an apocalyptic mindset would filter into the Jesus Movement. Among other things, it makes a catchy theme for a lyric. Witness Larry Norman’s most famous song: “Children died, the days grew cold/A piece of bread could buy a bag of gold/I wish we’d all been ready. . . .” read on>>>

The Classics in Crisis

Randall Stephens

Over at the NYRB Mary Beard worries that when it comes to the future of the classics "the basic message is a gloomy one." ("Do the Classics Have a Future?" January 12, 2012.) With some horror she writes that "Literally hundreds of books, articles, reviews, and Op-Ed pieces have appeared over the last ten years or so, with titles like 'The Classics in Crisis,' 'Can the Classics Survive?,' 'Who Killed Homer?,' 'Why America Needs the Classical Tradition,' and 'Saving the Classics from Conservatives.'" It all sounds like similar lamentations about the humanities in general, which we have covered here, here, and here.

Beard turns turns questions about decline back on themselves. "What drives us so insistently to examine the 'state' of the classics," she wonders, "and to buy books that lament their decline?" In Beard's view, notes about decline tell us as much about what people think about the classics and what they think about their own era. Reports "on the decline of the classics are not commentaries upon it, they are debates within it: they are in part the expressions of the loss and longing and the nostalgia that have always tinged classical studies." We see our own predicament and the direction of history in the study of the ancients.

In the end, she offers a good defense for the humanities by way of the classics. (Her argument is not unlike those made by Anthony Grafton and others in the NYRB.) "The important cultural point is that some people should have read Virgil and Dante," concludes Beard. "To put it another way, the overall strength of the classics is not to be measured by exactly how many young people know Latin and Greek from high school or university. It is better measured by asking how many believe that there should be people in the world who do know Latin and Greek, how many people think that there is an expertise in that worth taking seriously—and ultimately paying for."

End-of-Semester Hiatus: Holiday Edition

Randall Stephens

I'm flying over to Norway today to begin my Fulbright. I hope to post occasional dispatches from the land of the 9:30am sunrise. (I've stocked up on vitamin D.) So, we'll be back up and running as soon as things are settled across the water.

But in the meantime, check out these HS posts and others on Christmas, holidays, and general festivus.

"The Worst Christmas Music," The Onion, AV Staff, December 2, 2011

Historiann, “White Christmas” and A Christmas Story, December 11, 2011

"Yuletide Roundup," December 24, 2010, HS blog

Randall Stephens, "December 31st, 1759: Guinness Inceptum," December 31, 2010, HS blog

Paul Harvey, "Jewish Consumer Rites: Tracing Hanukkah's Roots to Cincinnati and Charleston," December 5, 2010, Religion in American History blog

Randall Stephens, "A Trippy, Merry Christmas" December 24, 2010, Religion in American History blog

"Hannah's Yorkshire Christmas Pie," December 22, 2009, Georgian London

Presidential History Roundup

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Ari Berman, "In Osawatomie, Obama Embraces New Populist Moment," The Nation, December 6, 2011

. . . . Obama’s pivot away from austerity orthodoxy and toward public investment began with his jobs speech in September, but he’s subsequently sharpened his language and focus in recent months in response to pressure from Occupy Wall Street. He’s now tackling issues of basic fairness and attacking the GOP’s brand of “your-on-your-own economics” in a much more direct way. His nod to Teddy Roosevelt, who delivered his “New Nationalism” speech in Osawatomie in 1910, could not have come at a more appropriate time.>>>

Adam Hochschild, "What Gingrich Didn’t Learn in Congo," New York Times, December 4, 2011

. . . . Mr. Gingrich would be our first president with a Ph.D. since Woodrow Wilson. Does his work as a historian tell us anything about him? Or, for that matter, anything about why, despite certain events in 1776, he considers “anticolonial” an epithet? To address these questions, a good place to start is his 1971 Tulane doctoral dissertation: “Belgian Education Policy in the Congo 1945-1960.”>>>

Lolly Bowean, "Piece of history rescued from time: Restorers give new life to 146-year-old copy of 13th Amendment," Chicago Tribune, December 7, 2011

In the moments after a hand-printed copy of the congressional resolution approving a 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution signed by Abraham Lincoln arrived at a South Loop graphic conservation firm, six staff members stood in silence, staring at the historic document.

Even with its wrinkles and creases, the 146-year-old artifact with faint, cursive writing that abolished slavery in the United States carried an emotional intensity.>>>

Kevin Opsahl, "USU lecturers talk about LDS presidential hopefuls in U.S. history," the Herald Journal, December 3, 2011

Two academics who spoke at Utah State University this week said they believe the "Mormon question" confronting voters in the 2012 Republican primary race is still present but not as strong as it was in 2008, when Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney failed in his quest for the GOP nomination.

The comments came Thursday when USU's Religious Studies program hosted a discussion between Newell Bringhurst, a retired professor of history and political science at College of the Sequoias and a liberal Democrat, and Craig Foster, a research specialist in the LDS Church's Family History Library and a conservative Republican.>>>

"Dec. 6, 1923: Calvin Coolidge Delivers First Presidential Address on Radio," December 6, 2011, New York Times Blog

On Dec. 6, 1923, the first presidential address was broadcast on the radio. President Calvin Coolidge delivered what is now known as the State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress.

The New York Times anticipated Coolidge’s address in its Dec. 5 edition: “The voice of President Coolidge, addressing Congress tomorrow, will be carried over a greater portion of the United States and will be heard by more people than the voice of any man in history.”>>>

Class Project Part 2: Moswetuset Hummock

Randall Stephens

About a year and a half ago I worked with students in my Critical Reading in History Class to create a history resource website for the Josiah Quincy House (a beautiful, well-preserved home, built in 1770 and just about a block from our main campus.) The work paid off. I blogged about it here and here. The local paper, the Patriot Ledger, even ran a full-page color story on it, interviewing me and the students. What's even better . . . that story in the paper, and our website, greatly boosted attendance at the historic home the summer after the semester ended.

This fall, with a new crop of students in the same class, we mulled over ideas for a similar project. We considered doing a website resource for a couple sites that no longer exist (the Quincy National Sailors Home and the Quincy Family Mansion, which used to grace our campus.) We also thought about doing a project on another old house in town (the Dorothy Quincy Homestead.)

In the end they chose to do their project on the Moswetuset Hummock, a patch of land/outcropping on a hill north of Wollaston beach. "Moswetuset," writes junior Austin Steelman, who took a lead on the project, means "'shaped like an arrowhead,' was the name of the Moswetuset or Massachusett Native American tribe from which the Commonwealth of Massachuesetts derives its name. The thickly-wooded hill was the summer seat of the tribe’s Sachem Chickatabot because of its view of the surrounding area and proximity to the bay, salt marshes, and the Blue Hills. It was here that Chickatabot met with Myles Standish of the Plymouth Colony in 1621 as the colonists began their early trade with the Indians."

This was quite a different project from the website we created for the Josiah Quincy House. Materials on the Hummock were much more spare. It was more challenging for them to find materials through Google Books, JSTOR, or just on the shelves of our library. Yet the students were certainly up to the challenge. They took photos and videos of the site. They collected maps, prints, and put together an extensive bibliography. Alex Foran, a journalism major, interviewed James Cameron, an emeritus professor of history here who has written extensively on local history and has done some work on the Moswetuset Hummock. A couple of the students made a pilgrimage to the Quincy Historical Society to gather maps and prints and to ask some good questions. While there they discovered a manuscript on the hummock that was written by none other than prof Cameron! With Cameron's blessing that MS is now on the site as a pdf.

Once again, this class effort was well worth it. I'm glad I got over my initial skepticism about group projects. Students seem to learn a great deal about research, hunting down evidence, and how best to present that to the broader public.

Spotting Anachronisms and the Development of Historical Consciousness

Randall Stephens

In the forthcoming January 2012 issue of Historically Speaking Donald Yerxa interviews Zachary S. Schiffman. In Schiffman's new book, The Birth of the Past (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), he looks at how the past emerged in the West—a past that was more than just before the present, but different from the present.

The interview and Schiffman's accompanying essay remind me of David Lowenthal's The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, 1985). "Historical insight has indeed progressed," wrote Lowenthal in his now-classic text. "Awareness of the past as a web of contingent events subject to unceasing re-evaluation supplant notions of a predestined unfolding or moral chronicle. Antiquity no longer automatically confers power or prestige, nor do primordial origins seem the sole key to destiny's secrets. The old exemplary use of the past 'has been undermined, battered and exploded by the growth of history itself'"(364). Moderns are attuned to anachronisms in ways that premoderns were not. That cell phone, fax machine, Prius, or electric guitar does not belong in that 16th-century woodcut print. (I include one of my 19th-century Star Wars pics I created recently to have fun with this idea. [I saw another photoshopper do something similar.] It's not so far off from how things operate at a Renaissance Fair, where a friend told me he recently spotted some dudes decked out in Star Wars gear.)

Yerxa asks Schiffman to explain some of the outlines of historical thinking in the interview.

Yerxa: Would you distinguish among several notions that often get sloshed together in our thinking and writing: the past, anachronism, historical consciousness, and historicism?

Schiffman: “The past” is a very tricky term, largely because it is so commonplace. On this account, I find it useful to distinguish between “the past” as the time before the present, and “the past” as a time different from the

present. Priority in time does not automatically entail difference, and it is the sense of difference that constitutes “the past” as a conceptual entity. . . .

The distinction between past and present calls to mind the idea of anachronism, another tricky term. An anachronism is, purely and simply, something taken out of historical context—think of the “Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch,” a plot device in the faux-medieval comedy, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. An idea of anachronism is an awareness of things taken out of context—hence the hand-grenade scene in Monty Python strikes us as “funny,” in every sense of the word. And this scene also demonstrates that the idea of anachronism can manifest itself in many different ways, not simply by the scrupulous avoidance anachronisms but also by the wanton indulgence in them. That the indulgence in anachronisms need not be funny—in any sense of the word—is demonstrated by the Renaissance idea of the “living past,” which at one and the same time accepts and transcends the distinction between past and present. For the humanists, this distinction evoked a gap—what Barkan calls the “sparking distance”—that inspired a dynamic interaction with the classical tradition.

The idea of anachronism brings us to a consideration of “historicism,” a term that has occasioned many disputes and much misunderstanding because it weaves together diverse strands of thought, each with its own long, complicated history. On this account, I find Friedrich Meinecke’s definition of historicism as the nexus of the ideas of individuality and development to be the most simple and elegant, for it precludes having to trace historicism’s many strands back to their beginnings. Meinecke located this nexus in the late 18th century, but some scholars have challenged this interpretation, claiming that there was a Renaissance historicism born of the idea of anachronism, which engendered an acute sense of historical and cultural relativism. However, as I realized many years ago in my dissertation, an idea of anachronism simply constitutes an awareness of individuality, which does not necessarily entail one of development. Ironically, Meinecke’s definition of historicism has led me to a conclusion that would have caused him to roll over in his grave, namely that a sustained sense of the difference between past and present was born of Cartesian relational thinking before “the past” became historicized in the late 18th century. . . .

How might history teachers use creative anachronisms to talk with students about historical thinking? Could we develop a Where's the Anachronistic Waldo games that exercise the historical part of the brain?

Weighing Scholarship

Randall Stephens

On this blog we've looked at the issue of assessment, standards, and weighing scholarship here, here, and here. But I'm willing to bet that nothing we've posted will come close to stirring the kind of controversy and debate that Mark Bauerlein's essay in the Chronicle will likely provoke ("The Research Bust," December 4). The amount of time that literary studies scholars spend on articles and books, he says, just isn't paying off. One major problem: overproduction.

"However much they certify their authors as professionals and win them jobs and tenure, essays and books of high scholarly merit in literary studies suffer the same inattention all the time" observes Bauerlein. He goes on:

Why? Because after four decades of mountainous publication, literary studies has reached a saturation point, the cascade of research having exhausted most of the subfields and overwhelmed the capacity of individuals to absorb the annual output. Who can read all of the 80 items of scholarship that are published on George Eliot each year? After 5,000 studies of Melville since 1960, what can the 5,001st say that will have anything but a microscopic audience of interested readers?*

He knows that it's a controversial point. He uses Google Scholar to track citations. (See the lively comments section.) Doubters will point out, writes Bauerlein, that this is a flat-footed approach, which does not take in the larger contribution of scholarship. Some will say that research makes scholars into better teachers. And others will point out that we need lots of work on subjects that will not draw major attention. That does not mean that the work is useless or can be tossed aside. Still, Bauerlein counters, these objections hardly justify a college or university paying 1/3 of a salary for work that doesn't have a significant impact.

Could this same sort of assessment be on the table for historians? (Get ready to figure out how to amp up your Google Scholar stats.) How should administrators and reformers measure impact or influence? Should they be doing so at all?

Anniversaries and Birthdays, 2012

Randall Stephens

2012 marks "the bicentenary of Dickens's birth, and the planned programme of events is huge," writes Dinah Birch in the TLS.

It will reach far beyond the literary world, encompassing exhibitions, debates, documentaries, theatrical performances, public readings, and television and radio programmes. Films will include a major new Great Expectations. In Houston, there is to be a half-marathon especially for Dickens enthusiasts. No one with a taste for history, books, public events, or dressing up need feel left out.

Dickens shares his birth year with Dorothea Dix, Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, and Harriet Martineau. But to paraphrase The Smiths, some names are bigger than others. These others will generate relatively minor celebrations as compared with Dickens birthday. As far as I know, though, the adjectives "Dumasian" or "Hugoian" do not roll off the tongue or conjure a whole range of ideas. Why do we commemorate and celebrate what we do? What make some events, birthdays more important than others?

What other anniversaries can we expect will be celebrated/commemorated in 2012? (The following sampling is collected from historyorb.com)

1852

Mar 20th - Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" published (Boston)

May 18th - Massachusetts rules all school-age children must attend school

1912

Feb 8th - 1st eastbound US transcontinental flight lands in Jacksonville, Fla

Apr 2nd - Sun Yet Sen forms Guomindang-Party in China

Apr 15th - Titanic sinks at 2:27 AM off Newfoundland

Sep 27th - W C Handy publishes "Memphis Blues"

Oct 8th - 1st Balkan War begins - Montenegro declares war on Turkey

1952

Feb 7 – Elizabeth II is proclaimed Queen of the United Kingdom

Mar 27th - Sun Records of Memphis begins releasing records

May 8th - Mad Magazine debuts

Nov 4th - Eisenhower (R) elected 34th pres beating Adlai Stevenson (D)

A Plea for Maritime History

Heather Cox Richardson

“Difficulty between the United States and Great Britain about Wild Pigs.”

How can anyone not love a title like that? It’s from the New York Times, May 23, 1854, p. 4. The story explains that American whalemen had killed a few wild pigs on one of the Falkland Islands and that England and America were at a diplomatic breaking point over the incident. According to the article, American fishermen had stocked the islands with hogs thirty years before, and hunted them for food when they were fishing in the area. The French had introduced cattle to one of the islands with the same purpose. The problem now arose because the British crown now claimed possession of the Falklands, and all the animals on them.

In February 1854, the commander of the H. M. S. Express arrested the captains of two American vessels for the crime of killing thirty wild pigs the previous year. He took the captured fishing schooners to Port William, where apparently the ships were to be sold for the value of the pigs and to pay the fine for the crime of killing the animals. The effort was a fiasco, it seems. The American consul at Port William called over a warship from the coast of Brazil; the trial revealed that no one really knew who was where, when, and what laws applied anyway (the only longstanding rule on the books was against killing “cattle, &c.,” forcing the prosecutors to try to argue that a “wild pig” fell under the “&c.” part of that rule). It wasn’t even clear how many pigs had been killed. Ultimately, one of the American captains was fined, a cost he paid under protest.

The message of the crisis was clear to the newspaper reporter, though:

The English are trying to do here what they attempt everywhere they get an opportunity. They bluster and bully, and claim what they please to, and if their claim is admitted very well—they will then negotiate, and let you, for a handsome consideration, enjoy what was your own before.

The message of the crisis is also clear to this historian: Why on earth isn’t maritime history more popular? Admittedly, the death of a few wild pigs might be of enormous historical significance itself, but looking into it does suggest that there is a whole world of history out there that isn’t getting the attention it deserves. The crisis over the pigs illuminates on ongoing contest between the claims of landholders and fishermen to resources, a contest that stretched throughout the nineteenth century and that was key both to the construction of nations and to their interactions with other countries. The Falkland Islands, for example, changed hands so many times in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that when I looked up their history I stopped trying to keep track. And a leading American newspaper highlighted the story of the wild pigs and interpreted it as a major development in the nation’s relationship with England.

Politics and economics only begin to dip into what we can seine from maritime history. What about the environment? Wild pigs do enormous damage to the land, as scientists in Hawaii have documented. How did whalemen change local environments by turning them into commissaries? What about communication networks? The same page of the newspaper that yielded the pig story has long columns listing all the ships that had sailed, been seen, or been contacted in the previous two months, their port of call, what they carried, and where they were at the time. It also mentioned collisions and damage to ships. A scholar using GIS could recreate these voyages, and with them the world of maritime trade.

It seems to me likely that interest in maritime history took a dive when the turn-of-the-century expansionism and nationalism of Alfred T. Mahan fell into disfavor. But the fact that early practitioners took their studies in a direction that is no longer popular is no reason to ignore the history of human interaction with what amounts to about seventy percent of the earth’s surface.

Roundup: TED Talks by Historians

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David Christian: Big History, April 2011

Backed by stunning illustrations, David Christian narrates a complete history of the universe, from the Big Bang to the Internet, in a riveting 18 minutes. This is "Big History": an enlightening, wide-angle look at complexity, life and humanity, set against our slim share of the cosmic timeline.

George Dyson: The Birth of the Computer, June 2008

Historian George Dyson tells stories from the birth of the modern computer -- from its 17th-century origins to the hilarious notebooks of some early computer engineers.

Alice Dreger: Is Anatomy Destiny? June 2011

Alice Dreger works with people at the edge of anatomy, such as conjoined twins and intersexed people. In her observation, it's often a fuzzy line between male and female, among other anatomical distinctions. Which brings up a huge question: Why do we let our anatomy determine our fate?

Niall Ferguson: The 6 Killer Apps of Prosperity, September 2011

Over the past few centuries, Western cultures have been very good at creating general prosperity for themselves. Historian Niall Ferguson asks: Why the West, and less so the rest? He suggests half a dozen big ideas from Western culture — call them the 6 killer apps — that promote wealth, stability and innovation. And in this new century, he says, these apps are all shareable.

Edward Tenner: Unintended Consequences, September 2011

Every new invention changes the world — in ways both intentional and unexpected. Historian Edward Tenner tells stories that illustrate the under-appreciated gap between our ability to innovate and our ability to foresee the consequences.

Jared Diamond: Why Societies Collapse, October 2008

Why do societies fail? With lessons from the Norse of Iron Age Greenland, deforested Easter Island and present-day Montana, Jared Diamond talks about the signs that collapse is near, and how -- if we see it in time -- we can prevent it.