Topic 5, DILEMMAS OF IDENTITY

Part I: BECOMING AMERICAN & TRANSFORMING TRADITIONS
[FOCUS: Compare Roman Catholic and Jewish adaptations to American life and culture.]

I. Catholics in Protestant America:

BASIC QUESTION: How did America transform the RC Church?

Roman Catholics and Immigration in 19th-Century America

The European Context of 19th-Century Roman Catholicism: The Church Under Siege

Aftermath of the French Revolution, 1815-1848

Liberalism vs. Ultramontanism

The Age of Pope Pius IX [From the Catholic Encyclopedia] or Pius IX [from Wikipedia

The Syllabus of Errors

First Vatican Council and Papal Infallibility

Catholics in Colonial and Revolutionary America

Nativism  

American Nativism, 1830-1845

Cycles of Nativism in US History (From the National Immigration Forum)

Catholicism and Republican Values

Trusteeism

American Liberty & Anti-Catholic Prejudice

Discussion: You are a fair-minded person of no religious affiliation in the 1880s. Whose argument do you find more persuasive?

Ethnic identity & forging an American Catholic Church

Ethnicity and Identity [Gibbons, Abbelen, Miranda]

Discussion: What do these sources reveal about the problems immigration brought to the RC Church in the USA? If you were an American Catholic from one of the families settled since before the Revolution (like the Carrolls of Maryland) how would you respond to ideas of these three men?

The Americanist Controversy

People

John Carroll (1735-1815)

Elizabeth Ann Seton  (1774-1821)

John Hughes (1797-1864)

John Hughes and the Public School Issue

"How Dagger John Saved New York's Irish" (By William Stern in Urbanities

Isaac Hecker (1819-1888)

John Ireland (1838-1913)

Michael Corrigan (1839-1900)

James Cardinal Gibbons (1834-1921)

II. Jews in Protestant America

DISCUSSION: Did Judaism or Roman Catholicism adapt more easily to American life?

The American Jewish Experience through the 19th Century: Immigration and Acculturation

The European Context of 19th-Century Judaism

The Legacy of the French Revolution and Jewish Emancipation

Crosscurrents of Tradition, Assimilation, and Reform

The Emergence of Modern Antisemitism

Being Jewish in America

Tension between traditionalism  and innovation

Isaac Leeser (1806-1868)
Isaac Mayer Wise (1819-1900)
Solomon Schechter (1847-1915)

Development of Jewish Denominationalism [Read Wise and Schechter on Reform and Conservative Judaism. What seem to be the differences between them?]

Reform Judaism

Hebrew Union College

Pittsburgh Platform (1885)

Emergence of Conservative Judaism

Jewish Theological Seminary

Solomon Schechter

American Orthodoxy [and see the entry "Modern Orthodox Judaism. ]

Note on Immigration:  From 1865 to 1914 immigrants poured into the country in amazing numbers.  From 1865 to 1900 13.5 million arrived. After the turn of the century the pace increased  with about 9,000,000 arriving  by 1910. These numbers become truly significant by keeping in mind that in 1865 the nation’s population was about 30,000,000.

Comparative Chronologies

PART II: EXCLUDED FROM THE AMERICAN DREAM

Religious Responses to Racism in American Life

Martin Marty (chapter 12) points out 19th century groups excluded from the American dream despite moral reform movements like abolitionism and feminism that developed in antebellum America. He gives only very little attention to women and Asians (especially Chinese) to focus on the two groups that represent America's continuing problem with race, African Americans and Native Americans.

The African-American Experience

After the Civil War African Americans found in  the abolition of slavery a very incomplete emancipation. After Reconstruction in the South a system of legal discrimination and social control - Jim Crow laws -  through segregation and voting restrictions kept the new freemen in poverty and on the periphery of social life. In the North, the antebellum tradition of discrimination and segregation continued. And the growth of a virulent pseudo-scientific racism (from the 1870s through the 1920s and beyond) provided a rationale for the practices of exclusion.

African Americans responded in various ways to these facts of life in the United States. In particular they found in the Black Church an institution that nourished their identity, organized movements for reform, and transmitted their spiritual heritage into the 20th century.

African-American Religion in the 19th Century

Introduction to the Church in the Southern Black Community

The Native American Experience

It is instructive to consider the differences between African-American and Native American experiences.

Native American Religion in Early America 

Summary of Native American Religions

Native American Religious Culture

Native American Spirituality

Native Americans and Christianity

Legend of the Sun Dance

Sun Dance

The Ghost Dance (Imaging and Imagining the Ghost Dance: James Mooney's Illustrations and Photographs, 1891-1893: online exhibition of James Mooney's study of the 1890 Ghost Dance at Wounded Knee, comparing his 78 photographs of the Dance with eight illustrations he later prepared. Illustrates how first-person narratives evolve through one's cultural perspective "with the result that a misleading image of the Ghost Dance has continued to exist and shape our visualization of that ceremonial." From the William Hammond Mathers Museum of Indiana University.)

A Native American Anthology

Discussion questions on Black Elk:

1.       Pick out some passages useful for discussing Native American MYTH and SYMBOLISM

2.       What does  “The Great Vision” chapter reveal about Lakota religious culture?

3.       Pick out a ritual that you think is important for understanding Lakota myth and explain your choice

4.       What are the religious responses of Black Elk and his people to the threat to their community posed by the USA, particularly from General Custer and, later, at Wounded Knee?

5.       What does the chapter on the Messiah and the Ghost Dance suggest about how religions respond to historical challenges to traditions?