The date is September 6, 2011. It’s the first day of classes. The atmosphere is electric — charged by the return of thousands of students to campus and the pulse of current events. Exactly a decade has passed since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
The front-page story in the Boston Globe is “9/11: 10 Years On.” In other news, Barack Obama’s approval ratings have tanked and the Republican Party is on the hunt for a presidential candidate. Below the fold, the famously Mormon Mitt Romney, former Republican governor of Massachusetts, is in South Carolina, courting the Tea Party.
In room 316A of Eaton Hall, assistant professor of religion Heather Curtis is preparing to teach a course precisely geared for the times: Religion and American Politics. The course description is the kind that makes parents wish they could come back to school.
Religion and American Politics
‘In God We Trust,’ ‘One Nation Under God,’ ‘God Bless America’: Phrases like these alert us to the ongoing influence of religion in American public life. This course explores the role of religion in shaping American civic engagement and political activity from the 17th century to the present, aiming to put contemporary events in broader historical context.
Read Professor Curtis' Bio
Barack Obama’s pivotal 2008 speech on race in America turned the nation’s attention not only to the legacy of slavery with which we still struggle, but also to the rhetoric and style of worship at the nation’s predominantly African-American Protestant churches. Professor Curtis uses the speech to give insight into a political reality that mystified some pundits in the last election: that there were young evangelicals who supported the Obama campaign. While perception of today’s evangelicals paints them all as politically conservative, historically, evangelicals were a major force behind the movement to abolish slavery. So, says Curtis, support for Barack Obama among evangelicals is “not that surprising.”
As thematic as it is chronological, the course veers from the relationship between church and state in the colonial era to faith and the founders to religion and social activism around slavery and women’s rights. “Outsiders” is a theme that weaves in readings on Catholics, Mormons, Muslims, and Hindus. Other themes include the rise of the Religious Right, religion and politics post-9/11, and the 2012 election.
I think about how can I get students to think critically about how religion intersects international relations, economic policy, and political life.
Heather Curtis earned a Th.D. from Harvard University in 2005. Her first book, on suffering and divine healing in late 19th century American culture, won the Brewer Prize for best first book in the history of Christianity in 2007. Tufts hired her to teach the history of Christianity, with a focus on religion in American history, that same year. Her background might make her seem like an odd choice to teach a course with such a strong political slant. She’s the first to admit that her schedule took a surprising turn. “This wasn’t a class I imagined I’d include,” she says.
That was before she’d met the students for whom she ultimately designed the course. “The emphasis on diversity, active citizenship, and global leadership was so clear,” she recalls of her first Jumbo encounters. “Tufts has drawn students for whom improving the human condition has been a mission or a passion.” Curtis also noticed that “popular majors” for students passionate about changing the world “tend to be international relations and political science.” She devised this course to deepen students’ understanding and “diversify that thinking.” Her goal is to “get students to think critically about how religion intersects with international relations, economic policy, and political life,” she says. “Some have a sense that religion is related, but they don’t have a way to think about it.”
Beyond their ties to the State of Massachusetts, Democratic president John F. Kennedy and former Republican governor Mitt Romney might seem to have nothing in common, politically. Until you look at their status as religious outsiders. In running for the presidency, both had to answer pressing questions about whether their oath to a religious potentate — the Catholic Pope in Kennedy’s case and the Mormon Prophet in Romney’s — would ever override their allegiance to the Constitution.
“When I think of Hillary Clinton, I can’t help but think of Queen Esther,” said a self-described “devout Christian” voter in 2008 to then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. “You were brought to this position to make a difference and to make a change.” Professor Curtis would agree with the voter about the biblical roots of women’s political engagement — from Sarah Grimke’s time to Hillary Clinton’s — in the Book of Esther.
At first glance, a modest Puritan meeting house and a modern-day mega-church reveal a major shift in religious practice in the United States. Professor Curtis prefers to emphasize continuity. The line dividing Church and State has always been blurred — then, when Puritan leaders conducted business in the same space where their congregations worshiped, and now, when religious leaders use the pulpit to influence elections.
The Sept. 11 attacks played an enormous role in making religion a discipline that no one interested in world affairs could ignore. “Most now, post-9/11, sense that religion is relevant,” Curtis explains. “Many seem to believe that religion either plays a role in promoting world peace and justice, or that it contributes to violence, oppression, and ignorance. Teaching the class historically gets students to think about the complicated ways in which religion has effected American political engagement since the 17th century. To think about race, gender, and class, and to see that religion is not wholly on one side of the ledger or the other. Those are some of the things I want to do with the class.”
Students are reading the news and thinking about what happens in the present. That becomes a hook for understanding the past to think about what’s happening right now in a more complicated way.
Curtis is very clear about what the class is and is not. “It’s not a political science class,” she warns. “Nor is it a theories of religion class. It’s based on my scholarly identity as an historian who studies religion as a subject.”
Despite the warning, Religion and American Politics has managed to attract students from first-years through seniors, not only from religion, history, and American studies — the three humanities departments that cross-list the course — but from I.R. and political science as well.
Look at the syllabus and reasons for the attraction are obvious. Day one opens with a video clip from the 2008 Saddleback Church Civil Forum on the Presidency, starring evangelical pastor Rick Warren and then-presumptive nominees John McCain and Barack Obama. An American politics class might look at polling data to explain why an evangelical pastor would hold the first official face-off in a Christian house of worship.
Indeed, the next day, the pundits were on “This Week” with ABC-TV’s George Stephanopoulos, talking about how in 2006 evangelical votes for Republicans outnumbered votes for Democrats from organized labor and African Americans combined. There is a great deal of explanatory firepower in those figures. But Professor Curtis’ expertise in 19th century Protestantism and evangelicalism shines a whole new light on the political landscape.
“Illuminating,” writes Mark A. Noll of Christian Century magazine. “Fascinating,” says Rennie B. Schoepflin of the Journal of American History. Paul Harvey of American Studies calls it a “thoughtfully rendered study.” And Lauren F. Winner of Books and Culture: A Christian Review writes, “Heather Curtis has...remapped our imagination and transformed our understanding.
Heather Curtis’ first book, Faith in the Great Physician: Suffering and Divine Healing in American Culture, 1860-1900, has announced her arrival as a rising star among historians of religion. Her style of inquiry and interpretation — careful, rigorous, and evenhanded — is one she hopes to transmit to her students at Tufts.
So, too, does her skill as a teacher. Attuned to her students’ interests, she has mastered the art of using YouTube to open passageways into primary historical texts. Barack Obama’s 2008 speech on race, “A More Perfect Union,” becomes a segue into Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of an American Slave and George Armstrong’s The Christian Doctrine of Slavery. Mitt Romney’s 2007 “Faith in America” speech, in which he affirms his Mormon beliefs, becomes a doorway into readings on the Protestant Christian Social Gospel movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and Josiah Strong’s casting of Mormonism as one of the “seven perils” facing the United States. A clip of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s 2008 address on faith and politics at the Compassion Forum gives entrée to Sarah Grimke’s 1837 “Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, and the Condition of Woman.”
“The goal of the course is, on the one hand, to draw students who might not otherwise have considered religion. Then I try to introduce them to the resources that the study of religion has for analyzing the complexity of culture, of the history of American society, of contestations in political engagement.”
By her former students’ accounts, it’s a goal she’s been reaching, advising and inspiring students on the course’s research track to tackle projects on liberal evangelical leaders, the Native American Ghost Dance movement, and the political meaning behind Al Gore’s pick of Jewish senator Joseph Lieberman as his running mate in 2000.
Professor Curtis first designed the course in fall 2008, during the last presidential election. She taught it again in 2009, when the election was still fresh. “This year,” she says, “it will be a work in progress, adapted. It’s a very ‘live’ course, in that students are reading the news and thinking about what happens in the present. That becomes a hook for understanding the past to think about what’s happening right now in a more complicated way.” It’s a hook that’s got Tufts biting. 