Abstract
Throughout America’s history, religion has variously served to help or hinder social change. The promises associated with faith—to create order out of the world’s chaos, to decipher the unknown, to establish right from wrong—can not only strengthen tradition but also inspire transformation. As Christian Smith observes, “By possessing rich storehouses of moral standards by which social realities can be weighted in the scales and found wanting, religion can, has, and does serve as a principal source of a key element that generates the insurgent consciousness driving many social movements.”1 When religious radicals attempt to forge change, conservatives resist, and vice versa. Perpetually clashing at any given point in history, fundamentalism and radicalism differentiate and define each other, even when their boundaries blur.
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Notes
Christian Smith, “Introduction: Correcting a Curious Neglect, or Bringing Religion Back In,” in Christian Smith, ed., Disruptive Religion: The Force of Faith in Social Movement Activism (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), 1–25, at 11.
The Kidnapped Clergyman; or, Experience the Best Teacher (Boston: Dow and Jackson, 1839); Daniel S. Whitney, Warren: A Tragedy in Five Acts, Designed to Illustrate the Protection Which the Federal Union Extends to the Citizens of Massachusetts (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1850); William Wells Brown, The Escape; or, A Leap to Freedom, in Black Drama—1850 to Present, Alexander Street Press, L.L.C., available at <http://www.alexanderstreet.com>, cited September 15, 2003. The Escape and excerpts of The Kidnapped Clergyman are also available in Eric Gardner, ed., Major Voices: The Drama of Slavery (New Milford, CT: Toby Press, 2005). Brown’s The Experience is no longer extant; my analysis of the play is based on a synopsis in an advertisement in the National Anti-Slavery Standard (May 9, 1857), 3 (quoted in W. Edward Farrison, William Wells Brown: Author & Reformer [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969], 279).
David Swartz, “Bridging the Study of Culture and Religion: Pierre Bourdieu’s Political Economy of Symbolic Power,” Sociology of Religion 57 (September 1996): 71–85, at 79.
Pierre Bourdieu, “Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field,” Comparative Social Research 13 (1991): 1–44; Pierre Bourdieu, “Legitimation and Structured Interests in Weber’s Sociology of Religion,” in Scott Lash and Sam Whimster, eds., Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1987) 119–136.
Rhys H. Williams, “Religion as Political Resource: Culture or Ideology?” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 354 (December 1996): 368–378.
Bradford Verter, “Spiritual Capital: Theorizing Religion with Bourdieu against Bourdieu,” Sociological Theory 21.2 (June 2003): 150–174, at 151.
Michele Dillon, “Pierre Bourdieu, Religion, and Cultural Production,” Cultural Studies <-> Critical Methodologies 1.4 (November 2001): 411–429, at 426.
John R. McKivigan, The War Against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches, 1830–1865 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984).
Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) 131–132.
Larry E. Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701–1840 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987) especially 124–179.
David Donald, “The Proslavery Argument Reconsidered,” Journal of Southern History 32.1 (1971): 3–18, at 4.
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, “The Divine Sanction of Social Order: Religious Foundations of the Southern Slaveholders’ World View,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 55.2 (1987): 211–233, at 223.
Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 75.
Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “Modernizing Southern Slavery: The Proslavery Argument Reinterpreted,” in J. Morgan Krousser and James M. McPherson, eds., Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C Vann Woodward (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 27–49, at 28.
William L. Van Deburg, “William Lloyd Garrison and the ‘Pro-Slavery Priesthood’: The Changing Beliefs of an Evangelical Reformer, 1830–1840,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 43.2 (1975): 224–237.
C. C. Goen, “Broken Churches, Broken Nation: Regional Religion and North-South Alienation in Antebellum America,” Church History 52 (1983): 21–35, at 31.
For more on moral reform melodrama and middle-class patronage, see, for example, Bruce A. McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820–1870 (Iowa City: Univeristy of Iowa Press, 1992); Walter J. Meserve, “Social Awareness on Stage: Tensions Mounting, 1850–1859,” in Ron Engle, Tice L. Miller, and Oscar G. Brockett, eds., The American Stage: Social and Economic Issues from the Colonial Period to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 81–100; Jeffrey D. Mason, Melodrama and the Myth of America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); and John W. Frick, Theatre, Culture, and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
James Cherry, “Melodrama, Parody, and the Transformations of an American Genre,” PhD diss., CUNY Graduate Center, 2005, examines many ironic treatments of well-known moral reform plays.
See, for example, Harry J. Elam, Jr., “The Black Performer and the Performance of Blackness: The Escape; or, A Leap to Freedom by William Wells Brown and No Place to Be Somebody by Charles Gordone,” in Harry J. Elam, Jr. and David Krasner, eds., African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) 288–305; John Ernest, “The Reconstruction of Whiteness: William Wells Brown’s The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom,” PMLA 113.5 (October 1998): 1108–1121; and Paul Gilmore, “‘De Genewine Artekil’: William Wells Brown, Blackface Minstrelsy, and Abolitionism,” American Literature 69.4 (December 1997): 743–780. Rennie Simson, “Christianity: Hypocrisy and Honesty in the Afro-American Novel of the Mid-19th Century,” University of Dayton Review 15.3 (1982): 11–16, examines Christian hypocrisy in antebellum African American literature (including Brown’s Clotel) but does not discuss abolitionist plays.
Paul Jefferson, “Introduction,” The Travels of William Wells Brown, ed. Paul Jefferson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), 1–10, at 8–9.
“Art. 5—The ‘South-Side Defense of Slavery’” revised version of Nehemiah Adams, A South-Side View of Slavery, New Englander 13 (1855): 61–62.
W. Edward Farrison, “The Kidnapped Clergyman and Brown’s Experience” CLA Journal 18.1 (September 1974): 207–215, at 207.
William Wells Brown, ed., The Anti-Slavery Harp: A Collection of Songs for Anti-Slavery Meetings (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1848).
See Robert Lewis, “‘Rational Recreation’: Reforming Leisure in Antebellum America,” in David Keith Adams and Cornelis A. van Minnen, eds., Religious and Secular Reform in America: Ideas, Beliefs, and Social Change (New York: New York Univeristy Press, 1999), 121–132; and Amy E. Hughes, “Answering the Amusement Question: Antebellum Temperance Drama and the Christian Endorsement of Leisure,” New England Theatre Journal 15 (2004): 1–19.
Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 211–224.
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© 2007 William W. Demastes and Iris Smith Fischer
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Hughes, A.E. (2007). Defining Faith: Theatrical Reactions to Pro-Slavery Christianity in Antebellum America. In: Demastes, W.W., Fischer, I.S. (eds) Interrogating America through Theatre and Performance. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100787_3
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