Orthodox Christians in America by John H. Erickson Oxford Univ. Press 141 pp.; $22
African-American Religion by Albert Raboteau Oxford Univ. Press 142 pp.; $22
Harry S. Stout and Jon Butler, the American religion team at Yale University, have lined up an impressive roster of scholars to write books for their new series, Religion in American Life, projected to include 17 volumes when complete. Claudia and Richard Bushman are writing a book on Mormons, Randall Balmer on religion in twentieth-century America, Ann Braude on women and American religion, and Mark Noll on American Protestants, to name only a few of the distinguished historians who have agreed to contribute to the series.
These scholars are trying to do what most academics only talk about: reach beyond the walls of the ivory tower to a general audience—in this case, tenth graders, high schoolers more generally, and even the occasional adult reader, not to mention grad students cramming for comps. Expectations for the series are high: Oxford has demonstrated a commitment to such projects before, producing outstanding secondary school textbooks on American women’s history and African American history.
Among the first volumes to appear are Albert Raboteau’s on African Americans and John Erickson’s on the Eastern Orthodox. Both manage to translate scholarship into a young people’s lingua franca without compromising their intellectual integrity. Both try to show connections between religion and larger historical questions—immigration, slavery, urban development.
Most readers will come to Erickson’s book with a virtually blank slate regarding Orthodoxy in early America, but a few may recall hearing of missionary activity and settlements on the Pacific Rim. For those readers, Erickson has a surprise in store: the story of an Orthodox settlement in Revolutionary-era Florida. Carrying the narrative forward, he introduces readers to indigenous Alaskans who adopted Orthodoxy, investigates the impact of the Russian Revolution on the North American diocese of the Russian Orthodox church, and examines Orthodox participation at Selma.
Of course, the civil-rights struggle plays a large role in Raboteau’s study. In his chapter on the movement, Raboteau makes clear that “black churches were more political and black protest movements more religious than critics admitted.” Indeed, this theme runs throughout his narrative, as Raboteau rehearses the relationship between black churches and abolitionism, explaining how “Practicing religion itself could be … an act of resistance” for slaves.
Unfortunately, the books contain only a handful of primary sources. Stout and Butler might have taken Freedom’s Unfinished Revolution as their model. A high-school textbook about the Civil War and Reconstruction written by the American Social History Project, Freedom’s Unfinished Revolution includes not only dozens of provocative primary sources but also suggested activities that incorporate the sources in order to teach kids not only about what happened in a given place, but also how to be historians. Some of the primary sources included in the Religion in American Life books are curious, especially given that there are so few. One of four documents included in African-American Religion is an excerpt from Ida B. Wells’s antilynching appeal to President McKinley. Lynching is certainly a key issue in postbellum African American history, but the connections between religion and lynching are subtle, not immediately obvious to most doctoral candidates in U.S. history, never mind schoolchildren. Raboteau makes no effort to explicate the relevance of this document to religion.
Homeschoolers should relish this series, but one wonders about how these books will get into the hands of other students. Will only elite private schools and the wealthiest, most innovative public schools have the vision and resources to invest in a series of books on American religion (or a semester-long course on the Civil War and Reconstruction, for that matter)? That students in Camden may never see Raboteau’s African-American Religion is more a commentary on American education than on the series, but it does make one wonder about the ex tent to which the authors are indeed reaching beyond the ivory tower.
—Lauren F. Winner
Death, Religion, and the Family in England, 1480-1750 by Ralph Houlbrooke Clarendon Press/Oxford Univ. Press 2,435 pp.; $99
Ralph Houlbrooke’s book is a contribution to the murky domain of “early modern” Europe, where historians regularly attempt to chart, but also to explain, how Europe in the eighteenth century came to differ from Europe in the thirteenth century. Houlbrooke traces the history of death practices (that is, customs such as writing wills, laying out corpses, and preaching funeral sermons) in early modern England. This is a book filled with examples of changing practices, yet disappointingly thin on explanations for the transformations.
At the outset, Houlbrooke notes that death practices were closely linked to the religious and political situation. Yet once he has drawn attention to those links, he provides few clues to the connection between political, religious, and cultural developments. To be sure, some of the altered death practices were obviously related to the introduction of the Reformation in England; gifts to religious houses declined when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, and Edward VI’s revision of the prayer book led to the disappearance of the rite of extreme unction.
The sources of other changes are less obvious. Houlbrooke gives no explanation for the decreased involvement of clergy in the composition of wills; the increased use of funeral sermons; the growing popularity of family graveside monuments; or new regulations that required a coffin for burial. And since he does not elucidate the connection between such changes in death practices and the altered political and religious landscape, he fails as well to explicate the larger political and religious history of the period. The book spans the rise of the Tudors, the Reformation, the Commonwealth of Oliver Cromwell, and the Restoration of the monarchy, yet Houlbrooke misses the opportunity to address significant questions in the history of English Protestantism and the evolution of English politics.
In sum, Houlbrooke does very well at fulfilling the first goal of early modernists: he shows with a wealth of detail that people did not die in the same manner in the eighteenth century as they did five centuries earlier. He doesn’t fare as well on the second goal, and this missed opportunity is a shame. Since the experience of death itself is one fundamental reality modern people continue to share with people of earlier centuries, greater interpretive verve in explaining these changes in death practices—changes that subtly or not so subtly altered the cultural meanings attached to this universal event—would have made this a much more valuable book.
—Mary Noll
Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy by Kevin Bales Univ. of California Press 298 pp.; $27.50
“I‘ve learned a lot in the past few months,” I wrote. “For example, I’ve learned that the other conservative magazine you suggested I send my essay to has room for a defense of pornography and endless hit pieces on public figures, but no space at all for the teenage sex slaves in Asia who service our boys in uniform—at taxpayers’ expense.” I penned these words in response to a note, one of many I’ve received since late 1998, from an editor at a conservative magazine. He said that the article I’d sent him on the U.S. military’s involvement in the Asian sex trade was informative, “but there’s not much interest in that around here.” How strange, I thought, that one of the United States’ most forthrightly pro-life magazines wouldn’t have any interest in the fact that thousands upon thousands of impoverished Filipino, Thai, and Korean girls, impregnated and forgotten by American servicemen, have been coerced into procuring abortions. (All the better to expedite their return to the brothels, of course.) And how peculiar that a thoughtful journal that, among many other useful projects, promotes the idea of the United States as a City on a Hill should turn a glib shoulder to the some 50,000 destitute Filipino children fathered and abandoned by American military personnel.
It isn’t that I don’t understand the reluctance of Americans generally and conservative intellectuals in particular to take an interest in the U.S. military’s role in building and sustaining the now-massive Asian sex trade. “If the girls didn’t work in the brothels they’d starve.” “Boys will be boys.” “There’s always been prostitution.” “Asian women like being sex slaves.” And perhaps most important, though never spoken: It’s politically improper for conservatives to say anything that seems critical of the U.S. military. And so on.
But, as the youthful evangelical slogan has it, I am compelled to “keep on keeping on” insofar as this matter is concerned, for I have seen the Filipino, Thai, and Korean sex industries up close. I have spoken with the slave girls whose bodies are that trade’s expendable capital. And I have seen their eyes and the murdered souls they betray.
Kevin Bales calls one such girl “Siri.” (The pseudonym is obligatory; if the Thai girl’s true identity were made known her pimp would either have her gang-raped and beaten or killed.) When Siri wakes it is usually about noon. “In the instant of waking she knows exactly who and what she has be come,” Bales writes. “[T]he soreness in her genitals reminds her of the fifteen men she had sex with the night before.” Siri is 15 years old.
Unwittingly sold by her desperate parents into slavery, Siri’s “resistance and her desire to escape the brothel are breaking down and acceptance and resignation are taking their place.” The brothel where Siri is held captive is “just around the corner from a new Western-style shopping mall”—the sort of place to which sailors and marines, Japanese and European sex tourists and pedophiles repair for a burger and Coke after a few hours of soaking in the local attractions.
The good news is that Siri is relatively well fed. A wasted body wouldn’t do her pimp much good, after all. In the words of a famous T-shirt sold in the Philippines, Siri and her kind are “rice powered f—g machines.” See? The sex trade is good! Siri wouldn’t eat so well back home!
Bales tells us that because Siri looks like a healthy child she can be sold as a “new” girl. She can be rented for $15—more than twice that charged for the other girls. Siri “takes a dark pride in her higher price and in the large number of men who choose her. It is the adjustment of the concentration camp, an effort to make sense of horror.”
Siri prays each day to Buddha, “trying to earn the merit that will preserve her from disease.” She also makes an effort to see to it that her clients use condoms, and here she has the Joint Chiefs of Staff on her side. You will pardon the cliche, but the medical department aboard the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Ranger, upon which I served for four years, passed out condoms like there was no tomorrow—which, for the drunken fool who killed a Thai police officer in Bangkok and then was himself shot, there wasn’t. Such mishaps aside, however, Siri’s pimp (generous with meals) and the Ranger‘s captain (generous with condoms) had one thing in common: A bold determination to look after their investments.
Not that the efforts of the Ranger‘s brave leader prevented perhaps a few hundred sailors from contracting VD anyway. And of course, the well-being of the prostitutes was never a concern. It never is. The matter is simple: Siri wants man to wear condom. Man, not wanting to die from AIDS, wears condom. Mission accomplished. Man goes back to the United States and complains about Bill Clinton’s bad influence on the country. Siri rots. The governments of the Philippines and Thailand couldn’t care less.
Bales says that, like many rural Thais, “Siri had a sheltered childhood and she was ignorant of what it meant to work in a brothel.” Just like many of the Filipino bar girls presently working the clubs outside the U.S. military bases in Okinawa, Siri was lured into Thailand’s brothel system by a professional predator who promised her and her family respectable work and a decent income. And, like so many others, once Siri became aware of the facts, she ran away. But on the street and penniless in a nation bereft of justice, Siri “was quickly caught, dragged back, beaten, and raped. That night she was forced to take on a chain of clients until the early morning. The beatings and the work continued night after night until her will was broken.”
I don’t expect that a friend of mine, a career marine, really knows all of what he’s talking about when he complains that the service just ain’t what it used to be. “Now we have to be politically correct,” he says. Meanwhile, Siri says, “I’m no star; I’m just a whore, that’s all.” And Kevin Bales wonders how the wholesale trade in East Asian girls can continue. “What keeps it working?” he asks.
Bales provides answers to that question and many others about the “new slavery in the global economy,” of which sexual slavery is but one dimension. But I won’t tell you what they are. I want you to read this book for yourself. If you read no other book this year, read this one.
—Preston Jones
Preston Jones, who served in the U.S. Navy from 1986 to 1990, has contributed essays and reviews to numerous American and Canadian publications. Mary Noll is a graduate student in early modern European history at Yale University.
Copyright © 1999 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
