Secrets of a Master Scholar
July 29, 2008 | 
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Paul Harvey is Professor of History at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. A nationally known scholar of Southern history and religion, he is also an acclaimed teacher who brings his profound knowledge to the classroom. Dr. Harvey has authored three books, edited three volumes, and is a co-editor of “Themes in American Culture and Religion”. Colorado Springs Record+ presents an interview with Dr. Harvey in the month of America’s birth.
CSR+: Congratulations on being awarded Teacher of the Year at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs 2007-08. It is a great honor that recognizes you an academic leader at UCCS and in the community. What has contributed to the quality of your teaching excellence?
I have compared teaching history classes to my favorite musical form: jazz. Teaching is taking a theme, making sure that theme is explored, but allowing plenty of room for improvisation, and most especially for those moments when a student conversation or insight “takes flight”, and something totally unexpected emerges. Being rigorously trained in the discipline, being clear and firm on the standards expected in the classroom, but also being open “to the moment”—all of these combined are required, I believe, for the best teaching. It requires a careful blend of discipline, structure, and spontaneity which never stays the same from one class to another. One also has to have a lot of patience and forgiveness, both for students, but also for one’s own self; every day is not going to be a shining moment of teaching brilliance, and sometimes your most valued and ostensibly impressive teaching experiments will just flat-out fail. That’s fine, as long as one always learns from the experience.
CSR+: Your area of expertise is American history, Southern history in particular. What has attracted you to the South and its history?
Although I grew up in Oklahoma, sort of the western edge of the South, I attended graduate school in Berkeley, in part to get as far away from the South as I could. But my professor there, Leon Litwack, taught me that questions of southern history are in many ways the most fundamentally important and profound of American history. Southern history is really about this question: what is the meaning of freedom? And that question took on a particularly powerful edge in the context of the southern history of slavery and racial oppression. Thus, it seems to me the most fundamentally important questions that Humanities scholars explore take on heightened significance in the study of the U.S. South, and that is what constantly draws my attention there.
CSR+: Your particular interest lies in the impact of religion on American culture and society. How would you characterize the profound impact religion has had or has on American culture? Is it different from the impact of religion other societies around the world?
The impact of religion in America presents a fundamental paradox. On the one hand, the United States was founded with the principle of the separation of church and state, without any established church or religious tests for office. Some of the founding fathers, such as Thomas Jefferson, believed that this would lead to a society based on rationalism rather than (as Jefferson saw them) biblical myths and religious superstitions. But then, as it turned out, history worked out very differently, and the United States became a place where religion exerted more influence than perhaps any other society in the western world. That influence was deeply pervasive and cultural, rather than strictly political, and this dates, I believe, from the antebellum era of American history (about the 1820s forward), with what is called the “Second Great Awakening.” That is when evangelicalism became a dominant form of religious expression. It’s hard to compare America’s experience with religion’s influence to anywhere else, for in this regard the United States is sui generis, unlike anywhere else.
CSR+: In the book “Redeeming the South”, you talk about two different and divergent Baptist societies that evolved in the South over two centuries, resulting in a reshaping the history and growth of the South. How different were these two societies? Did they work at cross-purposes, or was there any collaboration and co-operation of any kind? Are these societies coming together in the 21st Century?
My argument there is that white and black Baptists were on different sides of the race divide in the South, and of course whites held all the political and social power. But white and black Baptists held many commonalities as well. After the Civil War, one of those interesting points of intersection was the idea of “respectability,” as both white and black Baptist leaders believed that their historically poor and marginalized folk needed to learn the ways of uplift, social mobility, and proper public behavior; they needed to be made into good bourgeois citizens. So, they worked at cross-purposes politically, but not necessarily culturally. Today, religion remains a major source of cultural divide; the shock of many whites towards the comments of Pastor Jeremiah Wright, for example, came because few whites understood the historical context in which Pastor Wright was speaking, while black Americans, regardless of whether they agreed with the specific assertions in those comments, well understood the legacy from which Pastor Wright emerged. So, no, “these societies,” as you put it, are not really coming together.
CSR+: Your book “Freedom’s Coming” talks about an inter-racial Christian “evangelical counterculture” that challenged the world of Jim Crow and brought it to its end. Please elaborate.
I suggest in “Freedom’s Coming” that black evangelicals and a few white countercultural “prophets” took the historic language of evangelicalism, which for centuries had justified racial oppression, and completely transformed the meaning of that religious legacy, so that a small minority of civil rights activists together with brave people, mostly black but some white, successfully demolished the system of American apartheid. This still represents, to me, one of the most astounding social revolutions of all of American history.
CSR+: You are working on two books presently: “Jesus in Red, White and Black” and “Religion, Race and American Ideas of Freedom”. What are the main hypotheses of these two books? When are they going to be published?
I am co-authoring Jesus in Red, White, and Black with the historian Ed Blum of San Diego State University; we should complete the manuscript early next year (2009) and hopefully the book will be published in 2010. In that book, we suggest that the figure of Jesus in American history became a de facto white man, but African Americans and Native Americans took the “white Jesus” they were given and transformed him into a figure of liberatory power.
The second book, “Religion, Race, and American Ideas of Freedom”, is a much longer-term project, one that I anticipate will carry me through the next five years or so; I intend to make it sort of my career scholarly contribution to my field of American religious history. Essentially, this book will explore the most fundamental dialectic of American religious history: the tension between the universalist promises of freedom (including religious freedom) in the nation’s founding documents, and the de facto culture of white Protestantism which for much of American history delimited and marked out the real meaning of “freedom.” But through that history, African Americans, Latinos, Native peoples, and white radicals over centuries of time challenged and eventually cracked the de facto culture of white Protestant thought and culture, and compelled new definitions of American freedom. In short, this book is really a social history of religious freedom. I don’t know when it will be done. It’s a big project and has me deeply immersed in fields (especially Native American religious history) which I’ve never really studied before.
CSR+: What role does religion play in current American society? Is it healthy or unhealthy? How do you see the role of religion on American society evolving as our country’s population becomes more diversified?
That’s a hard question to answer, because in the field of religious studies, no one really agrees on what the term “religion” means, and certainly the impact of religion in public life, and whether that is “healthy” or “unhealthy,” is deeply disputed – just think of the arguments about groups such as Focus on the Family, for example. Religion is deeply ingrained, for better or worse, in our national identity, in our political dialogues, and even in the most basic metaphors that we use to understand America as a country. That’s why a 17th-century Puritan phrase, “city upon a hill,” has had such a long life in American politics. That kind of American idealism, derived ultimately from religious ideas, has inspired much of what is best in our country’s history (including the ideals of religious freedom, however imperfectly practiced, that I mentioned above), as well as much of what is worst in our history (including the legacies of slavery, racism, intolerance, and religiously motivated violence). Nowadays, as Americans learn pretty much for the first time in our history what “pluralism” truly means – i.e., not just different varieties of Christians, or even different varieties of Jews and Christians, but multitudes of different faiths living together in close proximity – our religious heritage of de facto Protestantism continues to lag behind the reality of religious pluralism. That explains the tortured debate about whether America is a “Christian nation.” Yet the U.S. has the promise to show what a truly religious pluralistic society looks like. We’re a long ways from that, but we’re a far sight better than we used to be.
CSR+: Some people say that two of the major religions of the world, Christianity and Islam, are at odds in many ways, thereby leading to great conflicts. What are your thoughts in this regard?
There is no such thing as “Christianity” or “Islam” per se; there are only historic expressions of those general religious terminologies, and of course “Christianity” and “Islam” comes in a nearly infinite variety of expression. Historically, those who defined themselves as “Christians” and those who defined themselves as “Muslims” have lived in peace and harmony in many times and places, and in war and bloodshed at other times. The vast majority of people want peace and tend to be tolerant and understanding of other people’s faiths. Politically, however, the terms “Christendom” or “the Islamic world” have become political slogans, terribly oversimplified and exaggerated in media representations, and the result presently has tended towards disaster.
CSR+: You are an international scholar. You are a great teacher as well. How do you balance your teaching and research? Would you be willing to share your secrets of success with our readers?
Work your butt off, don’t sleep . . . wait, that’s not very helpful. The key, I think, is always integrating teaching with research, so that when I’m preparing for class I’m also preparing my research, and when I think about my research I’m also in effect preparing for class. For example, the idea for my book “Religion, Race, and American Ideas of Freedom” came from my teaching – I saw again and again how the expansive ideas of religious freedom in American arose at precisely the same time as the huge explosion of slavery, racism, and genocide practiced against Native Americans, and I began to question why that was. Likewise, when I began writing my part of the book Jesus in Red, White, and Black, I constructed a course in part to help me think through ideas for the book, and also to present those ideas to students. The result was one of the most successful classes I’ve ever taught. So, I never teach classes the same way twice; I always try to bring in new ideas from my research, and that makes me more excited about research and keeps my classes fresher and more engaging, or at least I hope so.
CSR+ Thank you so much for taking time from your intense schedule to share your thoughts with us. All the best to you with your upcoming projects.
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