PrintProfessor Randall Balmer is no stranger to religious diversity. Raised by evangelists, he left his fundamentalist background when he became a liberal in the 1970s. Then he joined the Episcopal Church and became ordained in 2006. Over the course of his almost 30-year career, he’s authored numerous books, including his most recent, “God in the White House,” and has appeared on TV shows including “The Colbert Report,” where last week, he spoke against Pope Benedict’s move to absorb conservative Episcopalians and Anglicans into the Vatican. Melanie Jones talked with Balmer about the difference between bias and balance, bringing academia back to earth, and why he won’t be taking the Pope up on his offer.
1. You're a professor of religious history here at Barnard, but you're also an Episcopal priest. Do you ever worry about the issue of subjectivity? Or do you feel your perspective as a clergyman helps you in your lessons? Is there a difference between being unbiased and being "fair"?
If we've learned nothing else from postmodernism in recent years, we've learned that true objectivity is, if not impossible, at least elusive. Yes, of course I'm subjective; everyone is. The real issue is how we deal with our subjectivity. When I'm addressing something about which I have strong convictions, whether in the classroom or in a publication, I feel obliged to disclose my biases. When I wrote a book about the Religious Right a couple of years ago, for example, I was careful to say that I approached the topic not as a detached observer but as someone with an investment in the topic. The first sentence of the preface reads: "I write as a jilted lover."
I'm not sure that my status as a "clergyman" helps or hinders me one way or another in the classroom. I'm about to complete my twenty-fifth year of teaching here at Columbia, whereas I've only been ordained a month shy of three years. Although I hope that my teaching continues to evolve, I suspect my style was forged long before I ever thought seriously about pursuing the priesthood.
As for the difference between fair and unbiased, I try very hard to be fair, even when I acknowledge my own biases. I'm sure I don't always succeed, but I try. I confess that teaching a new course on Mormonism this semester, for example, has presented a bit of a challenge. When I lecture about the Spaulding Manuscript or Joseph Smith's "Book of Abraham," both of which cast very serious doubts on the integrity of Mormonism, I force myself to withhold my own judgments and simply present the material as straightforwardly as I can.
2. You've been nominated for an Emmy for script-writing and hosting a PBS adaptation of your book Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory, and just last week you were on the Colbert Report. How did you get involved in both these projects? What was it like being a professor backstage or in an audience of entertainers?
When I embarked on doctoral studies in 1980, I made a vow that I would never allow my scholarship to become so recondite that I could not communicate with a larger audience. During graduate school, along side of my scholarly pursuits, I developed a discipline of writing book reviews and op-ed pieces for newspapers. I enjoy lecturing to popular audiences, whether it be the Smithsonian Associates, the Commonwealth Club of California, or the Chautauqua Institution. I view all of this as part of my responsibility as a scholar, and I've come to believe that one of the reasons our society finds itself in the situation we're in is because we academics have neglected to communicate outside of the academy. We prefer to talk among ourselves, often in jargon-laden language that is indecipherable to anyone outside of our own specialties. We've now reached the point where the average American is deriving his information on current events from Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. I find that frightening. We're in serious trouble as a society, and it's because, in part at least, we academics view it as somehow beneath our dignity to communicate with the masses. I emphatically reject that presumption.
"Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory" was an ethnographic journey into evangelical America that was triggered by the televangelist scandals of the mid-1980s. I was trained as a colonial historian, so anything about the twentieth century was well beyond my expertise. I became distressed, however, at the media's treatment of evangelicals. They seemed to assume that all evangelicals were the moral equivalent of Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, two of the televangelists who were embroiled at the time in spectacular scandals. Having been reared as an evangelical myself, I knew better, so I began a project that would explore evangelicalism, America's folk religion, at the grassroots.
The book appeared in 1989. Shortly thereafter, I was contacted by a production company about making the book into a PBS documentary, which I wrote and hosted. I did two other documentaries in the 1990s as well. I thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of translating difficult ideas into a popular medium -- but I had already been doing so, albeit in print media, long before that.
Depending on the news cycle, I receive several media inquiries every week, on average. I try to be very conscientious about returning reporters' calls, but I simply can't get to all of them, and I probably turn down as many television invitations as I accept. Again, I view it as my professional and civic responsibility to accept as many as possible, and some of them, like the Colbert Report or Jon Stewart, are a lot of fun.
3. On the Report, you said you wouldn't join the Catholic Church (which recently offered to open membership up to Episcopalians and Anglicans) because Catholicism defines itself in negative terms. If the Vatican opened its doors to women and gay priests, would you consider rejoining then? Or do you feel that the divide between the Episcopalian and Catholic Churches is an important, necessary one?
I have nothing against the Catholic Church and certainly nothing against Roman Catholics. At the same time, I have no desire to sign up! I was reared as an evangelical (a fundamentalist, really), and my parents once informed me that if I ever married a Catholic I would be disowned. I was convinced, growing up, that Catholics were not even Christians.
I no longer believe that, of course, but at the same time I have no hankering whatsoever to convert to Rome. I'm very content as an Episcopal priest, and I happen to believe that we Episcopalians are addressing some vitally important issues right now, including (but not limited to) homosexuality, same-sex unions, and the role of women. We're approaching these matters thoughtfully, prayerfully, and with integrity. The decisions we've made as a Church may well precipitate a continued diminution of our numbers, but that really doesn't bother me. Sometimes the price of faithfulness to the demands of the gospel is popularity. In my judgment, moreover, the most effective religious movements throughout American history have positioned themselves on the margins of society, not in the councils of power.
4. Your most recent book, God in the White House, discusses the ways in which religion has shaped the presidency since the 1960s. Where do you feel the line is between church and state? Can we really separate our religious beliefs form our political ones? Should we?
I don't for a moment argue that people of faith should not bring their religious convictions into the arena of public discourse. I happen to believe, in fact, that public discourse would be impoverished without those voices. At the same time, however, I am a passionate defender of the First Amendment and the separation of church and state, a notion that derives from Roger Williams, founder of the Baptist tradition in America. Williams worried that the "garden of the church" would be imperiled by the "wilderness of the world" unless it was protected by a "wall of separation." We must remember that the Puritans (Williams was still a Puritan when he wrote that) did not share our idyllic, post-Thoreau notions about wilderness. So Williams sought to protect the integrity of the faith from too close an association with the state.
The founders, in their wisdom, encoded Williams's formula into the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Those simple words set up a kind of free market for religion in America where (to extend the economic metaphor) religious entrepreneurs are free to peddle their wares. The First Amendment, in my view, has ensured a vibrant, salubrious religious culture unmatched anywhere in the world. Put another way, religion has flourished here as nowhere else because the government has (for the most part, at least) stayed out of the religion business.
I was one of the expert witnesses in the Alabama Ten Commandments case, when Roy S. Moore, then the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, plopped a two-and-one-half-ton granite monument, emblazoned with the Decalogue, in the lobby of the Judicial Building in Montgomery. When Judge Myron Thompson ruled (correctly) that the monument violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment and the workers were preparing to remove it, one of the protesters shouted, "Get your hands off my God!" Unless I miss my guess, one of the commandments etched onto the side of the monument said something about "graven images" -- thereby illustrating Roger Williams's point about protecting the integrity of the faith from associations with the state.
The genius of America, in my view, is our determination to safeguard the rights of minorities; that's the impulse that lay behind the First Amendment. What makes me patriotic is not flag-waving but rather the recognition that we Americans generally rise to our better selves -- not quickly enough, to be sure, in the matters of race or gender. But sooner or later, a sense of fair play prevails, and we seek to live up to the ideals inscribed into our charter documents.
5. On a similar topic, why was it that you decided to start with the Kennedy presidency in your book? His speech at the Rice Hotel was obviously a turning point, but why not discuss the religious rhetoric of Eisenhower, for example?
Dwight Eisenhower is a fascinating figure -- the only sitting president, as far as I can tell, to be baptized while in office. During the 1952 presidential campaign it emerged that he had never been baptized. When confronted with this anomaly, Eisenhower allowed that he was pretty busy running for president right then and that he'd get around to it when things slowed down a bit. (Can you imagine a presidential candidate saying something like that now!)
The inspiration for "God in the White House" was George W. Bush's remark at the Des Moines Register debate, just prior to the Iowa precinct caucuses in 2000, that Jesus was his favorite political philosopher. Like many others, I scratched my head at that one, and my mind immediately turned to John F. Kennedy's speech at the Rice Hotel in Houston during the 1960 campaign, when he asked voters effectively to set aside a candidate's faith when they entered the voting booth. It seemed to me that there was quite a distance between Kennedy's remark in 1960 and Bush's comment in 2000. I wanted to tell that story, how we as a society got from point A to point B. "God in the White House" traces that narrative arc.
6. You have often been an outspoken opponent of the Religious Right. What if Christian doctrine was picked up and made into a movement by the Left? Would you still oppose the use of religious rhetoric to aid mass politics, or are you more against the specific ideas put forward by the Right?
I am, and I have been at least as far back as 1972, an unabashed political liberal. And it's a label, by the way, that I carry proudly. Liberalism is responsible for some pretty good things throughout American history: women's rights, the labor movement, Social Security, Medicare, the civil rights movement. I'm proud to be associated with that tradition, and even though the downstream media have tried mightily in recent decades to make "liberal" into a dirty word, I refuse to succumb by calling myself a "progressive" or anything else.
As for the associations of religion with the political left, American history is full of such examples. I'm thinking here of antebellum evangelicalism, with its agenda of abolitionism, women's rights, public education, and the rights of prisoners. Religion was very much tied into the Social Gospel movement at the turn of the twentieth century, working against corrupt political machines and on behalf of worker's rights in the face of the ravages of unbridled capitalism. Religious convictions informed the civil rights struggle as well as opposition to the war in Vietnam. So the notion of religion being associated with the left is by no means a novel idea. In fact, I argued in "Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America" that the Religious Right really represents an aberration both from the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament (blessed are the peacemakers, care for "the least of these") as well as from the noble legacy of nineteenth-century evangelicalism, which invariably took the part of those on the margins of society.
Now, are there dangers in associating the faith with any one political movement or party or ideology? Absolutely. Anytime people of faith hanker after political influence, they stand in danger of compromising their prophetic voice. That happened with mainline (liberal) Protestantism in the 1950s, and it certainly happened over the thirty-year history of the Religious Right, from 1978 to 2008.
A person of faith must always position herself on the outside, calling those in power to account. Martin Luther King Jr. provides a case in point. Even though he had worked with Lyndon Johnson for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, King refused to allow access to power compromise his prophetic witness. On April 4, 1967, King mounted the pulpit of Riverside Church here on Morningside Heights and unleashed a thunderous denunciation of Johnson's war in Vietnam. Despite his cooperation with Johnson on civil rights legislation, King retained his prophetic voice.