Matthew Avery Sutton has posted a response to Frederica Mathewes–Green’s recent piece in Books & Culture, “Holy Hegemony!” Alas, he doesn’t seem to have read her piece very carefully. Apart from that, the dispute points to some larger questions of interest about how academic books are reviewed (and not reviewed).
First some background. Sutton’s piece appeared on a blogsite that I’ve been recommending for some months now, both in this space and elsewhere, Religion in American History. It’s a site I’ll continue to visit regularly with profit. Matthew Avery Sutton is the author of Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (Harvard Univ. Press), a book that comes with praise from the historian Grant Wacker, a member of B&C‘s editorial board. On the recommendation of several people I respect (including the historian Paul Harvey, one of the founders of the Religion in American History group blog), I recently added Sutton to my list of potential contributors to B&C. We haven’t met, but we exchanged emails several months ago when Sutton wrote to say he’d like to contribute to the mag. I mentioned to him then that a review of his book—by Arlene Sánchez–Walsh, a scholar of Pentecostalism, now at Azusa Pacific University—was forthcoming in B&C. That review (quite favorable) is now in proofs for the May/June issue.
Here is how Sutton’s response begins:
Jerry Falwell is dead, and James Dobson may be increasingly irrelevant, but the culture wars are still alive and well on the pages of Christianity Today’s Books and Culture. This was evident most recently in Frederica Mathewes–Green’s ridiculous review of Aaron K. Ketchell’s Holy Hills of the Ozarks: Religion and Tourism in Branson, Missouri (Johns Hopkins University Press). She entitles the review “Holy Hegemony.” Although she assumes that we all know that this refers to Ketchell’s book, it is not so clear once the article begins. Who is really practicing hegemony here? The young scholar publishing his first book and trying to begin a career, or a popular writer and veteran of the evangelical lecture circuit who felt it necessary to write a scathing, distorted review of his book, a review that entirely misses the point?
Let’s note to begin with that Sutton gets Mathewes–Green’s title wrong. There’s an exclamation point (“Holy Hegemony!”), alluding to the formula frequently employed by Robin in dialogue with Batman. (You can find dozens of examples in a few seconds via Google. For example: “Holy Haberdashery, Batman!”) We should further note that Christianity Today magazine and Books & Culture are separate publications, both of them published by Christianity Today International. But if you speak of “Christianity Today’s Books & Culture” in a sentence making the risible claim that the “culture wars are alive and well” in the pages of B&C, a sentence moreover that gratuitously drags Jerry Falwell and James Dobson into the conversation, you hint at a vast right–wing conspiracy, the orders coming from on high down to me, the editor. In short, this opening paragraph sets the tone for Sutton’s response, which is characterized by remarkable sloppiness and inaccuracy, humorlessness, and self–righteous huffing and puffing.
If you have read Mathewes–Green’s article, you know she pokes fun at the author of Holy Hills of the Ozarks for interpreting Branson in culture war terms. She’s not accusing Aaron Ketchell of “practicing hegemony.” But Sutton, tone–deaf, rises to the defense. He gives us Ketchell as a “young author” being bullied by “a popular writer and veteran of the evangelical lecture circuit.” I don’t know Ketchell’s age, but it is entirely irrelevant to this conversation, as it would be if I were to charge Sutton in return with beating up on a grandmother (as Mathewes–Green is, many times over).
The indictment proceeds. Sutton writes:
Mathewes–Green begins her article by poking fun at Branson, explaining that by “11:00 pm … everyone is snug in bed at the Red Roof Inn or the Best Western.” Once she establishes that she doesn’t take Branson too seriously herself, she opens her tirade against Ketchell. “It’s hard for him to see the ways Branson has changed,” she writes, because “he finds Branson baffling to start with. He recognizes it as representing one side of a culture war (the other side, it appears) and focuses on that to the exclusion of anything else.” She then takes shots at him for his acknowledgements (which is always an easy target for those who can’t mount a legitimate challenge at an author’s evidence), and tells us that Ketchell is—wait for it—a Catholic(!), implying that he obviously doesn’t get Protestants.
Curiouser and curiouser. When I read this paragraph, I was baffled. I didn’t remember any reference in Mathewes–Green’s article to Ketchell’s acknowledgments. She does refer to his introduction, which is a substantial chapter in itself (subtitled “The Moral Vineyards,” it runs from p. xi to p. xxxvi in Ketchell’s book). But just to be sure, I went back and re–read the article. Nope. No mention at all of Ketchell’s acknowledgments. How did that phrase go: “always an easy target for those who can’t mount a legitimate challenge at an author’s evidence”?
By the way, one of the writers who commented on Sutton’s post at Religion in American History was Ed Blum, who has written for B&C and has another piece in the queue (and reviews of two of his books in the mag are pending). Blum took Sutton’s assertions at face value—evidently he didn’t bother to read the article himself—and added a bit of moralizing of his own. Is this how good intellectual conversation proceeds?
And the business about Catholics and Protestants … . I started to wonder as I read if Sutton was under the misapprehension that Mathewes–Green is an evangelical. In fact, of course, she is the most widely known popular voice of Orthodox Christianity in America. She herself has been quite critical of evangelicals and evangelicalism on occasion. And for some time she reviewed movies regularly for Our Sunday Visitor, a Catholic publication. But apart from all that, Sutton has simply distorted what she wrote in her piece. Here is what she said:
Ketchell explains that he began studying Branson because his thesis advisor specialized in Marian apparitions, and the topic of folk religion drew his interest. (Of his own background, he says that his family “has for many generations been staunchly Catholic.”) As he thought about a past visit to the Ozarks, “I recalled that in that region one could not find statues of Mary or paintings of St. Sebastian skewered with arrows, yet its religious attractions were comparable mixtures of sacred and secular.” (I am stumped as to how a statue of Mary is a “mixture of sacred and secular”; I can only guess that Ketchell considers art intrinsically secular because it partakes of the material world.)
How Sutton got from that paragraph to his response is a mystery, like much else in his piece. But worse even than all these inaccuracies and distortions is the use to which they are put: to charge that Mathewes–Green has systematically, willfully misrepresented Ketchell’s book. There is room for disagreement with any review. But Sutton has done both Mathewes–Green and his readers a great injustice. In fact, as will be clear to any impartial reader, Mathewes–Green read Ketchell’s book carefully. She raises a number of specific points—here, to take just one example among many:
Ketchell states that “Branson’s tourism industry has utilized religious rhetoric to imbue landscape with a sense of inviolability grounded in utopian imaginings of the human–topography relationship.” It uses “consumer culture to express theologico–geographic sentiments.” At hymn–sings in Silver Dollar City’s rustic chapel, “it is easy to characterize the brand of religiosity offered at the site as Reformation–derived and often Manichean.” (More than once I felt like borrowing Inigo Montoya’s line from The Princess Bride: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”)
Mani pops up again in the Veterans’ Memorial Museum. Captured Axis materials there are accompanied by a note stating they are displayed as trophies of war, and intend no endorsement of Nazi views. In this Ketchell perceives “a Manichean world of absolute right and unconditional wrong—one that draws thick lines of ethical separation between religious and non–religious, country and city, and old–fashioned and modern.” Yet later on, when writing about a protest Branson residents held against events involving the KKK and Christian Identity groups, Ketchell seems to approve. Perhaps some “thick lines of ethical separation” are better than others.
This strikes me as a persuasive criticism. Perhaps Sutton disgrees. I don’t know. In any case, there are a number of such points in Mathewes–Green’s article, based on an attentive reading of Ketchell’s book. Indeed, one wishes that the editor for this book at Johns Hopkins University Press—one of the foremost university presses in the country—had read Ketchell even half as attentively as Mathewes–Green did.
Which reminds me of Sutton’s conclusion:
No, it is Mathewes–Green who is ignoring the evidence. Holy Hills is a careful, balanced, and sophisticated analysis of Branson that incorporates the latest religious and culture studies theory. That Mathewes–Green read this book through the lens of the culture wars tells us a whole lot more about her than it does about Ketchell’s brilliant and engaging book. For a different view of Holy Hills, see my review in Christian Century.
Well. If the abundant examples in Mathewes–Green’s essay aren’t sufficient, go to your local library. Check out Holy Hills of the Ozarks—request it via interlibrary loan if necessary. Once you get the book, open it at random and start reading. You won’t be at it very long before you encounter three or four words that are simply misused, not to mention conceptual muddle. This has nothing to do with debates over jargon, different rhetorical styles, and so on. Sutton does Ketchell no favors by calling his book “brilliant.” That cheapens the conversation for all of us. A better way to express friendship or a collegial spirit would be to offer to read his next book in manuscript, and give him candid criticism—criticism that doesn’t at all preclude a sympathetic reading.
Most academic books—be they terrible, or mediocre, or quite good, or brilliant—get very little review attention outside the specialized journals. That is too bad, because there is much of interest in these books to readers who are not obliged to keep up with their “field.” In B&C we review university press books in every issue. I just wish we had more pages and greater frequency. Many of the reviews—such as Sánchez–Walsh on Sutton—are by scholars in the subject at hand. Others are by generalists, or by scholars from another field. These different kinds of reviews are alike indispensable—and equally open to debate.
John Wilson is the editor of Books & Culture.
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