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WORK TITLE: Strangers Below
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://joshuaguthman.com/
CITY: Berea
STATE: KY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.berea.edu/his/faculty-and-staff/dr-joshua-guthman/ * http://joshuaguthman.com/bio/ * http://religiondispatches.org/author/joshua_guthman/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Northwestern University, B.A., 1996; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, M.A., 2000, Ph.D., 2008.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Cultural historian and academic. Berea College, Berea, KY, associate professor of history, 2009–.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Joshua Guthman is an American cultural historian and academic. Growing up in Los Angeles, he moved around extensively, including Chicago, London, North Carolina, and rural Kentucky. He graduated from Northwestern University in 1996 and continued his studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he completed his Ph.D. in 2008. He eventually became an associate professor of history at Berea College, where he teaches introductory U.S. history and seminars in the trans-national history of emotions, the American Civil War, American religious history, and microhistory. His academic research interests include religion, American history, emotional experience, and music From 2014 until 2016, he participated in the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture’s Young Scholars in American Religion Program.
On his website, he recalled that his early interests in religious history came one day when he found a shelf full of cassette tapes of recordings of old-time Baptists. He remembered appreciating the singing on the tapes and listened to what they were talking about. He admitted that listening to those tapes at that “unexpected moment struck me dead.”
Guthman published Strangers Below: Primitive Baptists and American Culture in 2015. The account looks at the small, anti-missionary, and anti-revivalistic Primitive Baptists group of Southern Calvinistic Christians to highlight the American Calvinist experience in the lead up to the Second Great Awakening and its folk revival after World War II. The account also shows how a great religious schism in the country was largely responsible for the formation of the Bible Belt. The book takes as its time frame 1803 to the current era in order to show how individuals in this movement have helped to shape American history. Guthman shows how the stories of many of the members of the Primitive Baptist Church were difficult, lonely, and full of struggle, but also aims to be inclusive with the recorded facts of their lives. The book positions Primitive Baptists in a unique position of serving as crucial to the formation of American Calvinism and being connected to many of the disagreements that created turbulence in the greater religious community. Guthman takes the history of the Primitive Baptists and treats them as something more than the theological or class phenomenon that most other historians approach them.
Writing in the Journal of Southern History, John P. Daly commented that the author’s ” of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century African American Primitives, especially the congregation in Huntsville, Alabama, documents how an almost completely ignored segment of African Americans in the South shared the Primitive impulse. Guthman’s catchall third chapter on markets, money, missions, and gender in the antebellum era is valuable in documenting how even Primitives used ‘the language of the market to discuss their religious affairs.'” In a review in Baptist History and Heritage, Michael A. Dain admitted that “Strangers Below is not a typical history of a denomination.” Dain concluded that “church historians will benefit from reading this volume and its alternative presentation of religious life. As important as institutions and theology are, there is a place to contemplate how religious feeling can shape religious decisions.”
Reviewing the book in Choice, A.C. Greene opined that “Guthman’s haunting, poetic style is perfectly matched to his subjects, and the book is … a delight to read.” In a review in the Apollon eJournal, David York noted that the book “has an elegantly constructed argument that does an outstanding job of proving the book’s thesis.” York reasoned that “as a whole, Strangers Below is a unique and interesting tale of a group that almost escaped notice from academia. This scholarly work’s use of primary and secondary sources helps to weave a previously untold tale that sparks interest and intrigue within the reader.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Baptist History and Heritage, June 22, 2016, Michael A. Dain, review of Strangers Below: Primitive Baptists and American Culture, p. 93.
Choice, March 1, 2016, A.C. Greene, review of Strangers Below, p. 1070.
Journal of Southern History, November 1, 2016, John P. Daly, review of Strangers Below, p. 956.
ONLINE
Apollon eJournal, http://www.apollonejournal.org/ (July 9, 2017), David York, review of Strangers Below.
Berea College Website, https://www.berea.edu/ (July 20, 2017), author profile.
Joshua Guthman Website, http://joshuaguthman.com (July 20, 2017).
Religious Dispatches, http://religiondispatches.org/ (July 20, 2017), author profile.*
Joshua Guthman
Joshua Guthman is a cultural historian with a particular interest in religion, emotional experience, and music. His book, Strangers Below: Primitive Baptists and American Culture, demonstrates the unlikely but enduring influence of a little-known group of antimissionary and antirevivalistic Baptists on American cultural and religious life. He was selected as a participant in the 2014–2016 Young Scholars in American Religion Program organized by the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture.
Dr. Joshua Guthman
Associate Professor of History
At Berea College since 2009
Contact Information
Frost Building, 301E
CPO 1866
Email: guthmanj@berea.edu
Phone: 859-985-3257
Fax: 859-985-3642
Spring 2017
Office Hours
Mondays and Wednesdays, 10:30 to noon
Tuesdays and Thursdays, noon to 12:30
By appointment
Class Schedule
GSTR 310 I (Tue/Thur: 10:00 am – 11:50 am)
HIS 186 JG (Mon/Wed: 12:40 pm – 2:30 pm)
HIS 200 (Mon/Wed/Fri: 9:20 am – 10:30 am)
Degrees
B.A., Northwestern University, 1996
M.A., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2000
Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2008
Biography
Joshua Guthman is a cultural historian with a particular interest in religion, emotional experience, and music. His book, Strangers Below: Primitive Baptists and American Culture, demonstrates the unlikely but enduring influence of a little-known group of anti-missionary and anti-revivalistic Baptists on American cultural and religious life. He was selected as a participant in the 2014–2016 Young Scholars in American Religion Program organized by the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture. At Berea, he teaches the introductory U.S. history survey and seminars in American religious history, the trans-national history of emotions, the American Civil War, and microhistory.
I grew up in Los Angeles, found my way to Chicago and London, spent a tough and beautiful decade in North Carolina, and have landed in, of all places, a small Kentucky town called Berea, where I live with with my son, write slowly and happily, and teach at the college.
I tumbled into writing religious history on a summer day many years ago when I casually took a cassette off a shelf loaded down with them, a cassette that carried the voices of a clutch of old-time Baptists, voices I'd never heard before, voices whose singing in that unexpected moment struck me dead. That's how I remember it. Of course, a proper historian would explain that it didn't happen quite that way, that one might trace the roots of my interest in religious experience back in time, that it all had begun long before I pressed "play" on that summer day.
Strangers Below: Primitive Baptists and American Culture
John P. Daly
Journal of Southern History. 82.4 (Nov. 2016): p956.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
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Strangers Below: Primitive Baptists and American Culture. By Joshua Guthman. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. [xii], 219. Paper, $27.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-2486-0.)
Historians have too often reduced Primitive Baptists to a theological or class phenomenon. In this era of multifaceted cultural analysis in history, Joshua Guthman brilliantly reveals the lived experience of Primitives. Following the lead of religious historians like Robert Orsi, Guthman gives readers a sense of the Primitive impulse by immersing them in the Primitive emotional and cultural experience. Most historians of religion and of the South know this small sect for its adherence to strict Calvinist predestination and its resistance to the mainstream evangelical developments of the early nineteenth century: creeping Arminianism, new revival measures, and, above all, missionary and institutional money raising. Guthman compellingly chronicles these historical and theological developments, but he goes beyond them to reveal the rich and complex internal and cultural life that drove the Primitives' stances. Primitives were psychologically set apart from what became dominant evangelicalism, though Guthman emphasizes that even in the early nineteenth century the triumph of missionary evangelicalism, and the future Bible Belt, was not set in stone.
Primitives rejected the assurance of salvation favored by more Arminian evangelicals because they ultimately did not feel such assurance. They could not support missions and revivals of evangelicals who confidently saw themselves as "the saved." Primitives rejected these evangelicals who knew the route to progress and salvation and believed they should be in charge of both. Primitives instead embraced an older Calvinist sense of guilt, uncertainty, humility, original sin, and helplessness in the face of God's absolute sovereignty and grace. Their Calvinist adherence grew out of their emotional proclivities and felt experience and not out of a doctrinal rigidness. From this same stubborn uncertainty came adherence to a simpler, older institutional order. Although many Primitives participated in and wanted the mainstream evangelical sense of certainty and control, they could not live it.
Guthman accomplishes his analytical purpose expertly in the introduction and first two chapters and then uses the next three chapters to dip into different eras, issues, and subcultures of the Primitives. Some of these stories and arguments are more compelling than others. Guthman calls his book's structure "idiosyncratic," and maybe that is an appropriate approach for such a stubborn and wonderfully unpredictable religious people (p. 17). His up-close vignettes pay the highest dividends in his final section on the popularity of Primitives' "high lonesome" musical style after 2001 (p. 120). His recounting of the music and religion of Roscoe Holcomb and Ralph Stanley is a wonderful way to close the book. The appeal of these musical echoes of America's strict Calvinist roots reveals that despite the tidal wave of celebrations of progressive free will in American religion and culture, a vital Calvinist strain has always survived.
Guthman's exploration of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century African American Primitives, especially the congregation in Huntsville, Alabama, documents how an almost completely ignored segment of African Americans in the South shared the Primitive impulse. Guthman's catchall third chapter on markets, money, missions, and gender in the antebellum era is valuable in documenting how even Primitives used "the language of the market to discuss their religious affairs" (p. 66). Primitives were appalled by antebellum southern evangelicals' rush to glorify material and financial progress. But contrary to the historical cliche, they were not backward, subsistence republicans bewildered and left behind by the market forces they resented. This insight alone puts this valuable chapter in line with the best of the voluminous research on southern evangelicals by the current generation of historians. Primitives--and Guthman--deserve a place of honor in this historical school. Primitives felt themselves to be "strangers below" on earth, but after this pithy and lively book they are much less strangers to Guthman's readers.
JOHN P. DALY
College at Brockport, State University of New York
Daly, John P.
Strangers Below: Primitive Baptists and American Culture
Michael A. Dain
Baptist History and Heritage. 51.2 (Summer 2016): p93.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Baptist History and Heritage Society
http://www.baptisthistory.org/
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Strangers Below: Primitive Baptists and American Culture. By Joshua Guthman. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. 219 pp.
Strangers Below is not a typical history of a denomination. Joshua Guthman has not presented a theological history, an institutional history or an ecclesiastical history, but has examined Primitive Baptists from a "lived history" perspective (p. 12). He set out to tell the story of Primitive Baptists through both their religious experiences and their emotions as they interacted with a changing American culture. Guthman has tried to tell the story of Primitive Baptists without reducing their experiences to either merely cultural revolt or theological dissent (p. 13). He asserts that Primitive Baptists were unique among the emerging evangelical factions seeking to shape the American Protestant story. Primitive Baptists were a people "beset by doubt" and this doubt, rather than ecclesiastical structures, social class, or theological ideology, mobilized their communities in their war against their Missionary Baptist brethren (p. 14).
In five chapters plus an epilogue Guthman narrates this emotive nature of the Primitive Baptist experience. Chapter one functions as an overview of the movement. Here Guthman helpfully suggests that Missionary Baptists lauded the successes of their new institutions at the expense of individual Baptist leaders such as Luther Rice. The institutions survived in spite of the weaknesses of their founders (p. 34). Primitive Baptists refused this historiographical model and instead continued to laud their ancestors. Primitive Baptists preferred the "older Baptist tropes" of the persecuted minority and the remnant church in the wilderness (p. 43).
Chapter two elaborates more fully on the emotive content of Primitive Baptist faith. Although they were affected by the broader evangelical revivalism, Primitives failed to cultivate the "normative emotional style of evangelical Protestantism" (p. 47). Guthman argues that the most "compelling explanation" for the rise of the Primitive Baptists is the doubt that persisted in their existential selves (p. 48). This self-doubt and a pessimistic worldview appear clearly in the lives and actions of Primitive Baptist leaders C. B. Hassell, a businessman and preacher, and Joshua Lawrence, a pastor in North Carolina. Guthman makes a compelling case that the pessimistic worldview and emotional experiences of these Primitive leaders fueled their invectives against the Missionary Baptists.
Chapters four and five depart from the antebellum origins of the Primitive denomination to first examine Black Primitive Baptists who established congregations after the Civil War across the South. Finally, Guthman examines how the pessimism and Calvinistic ethos of the Primitive Baptist movement made its way into folk music exemplified by "stars" such as Ralph Stanley and Roscoe Holcomb.
Black Primitives present an interesting caveat to the typical Primitive Baptist trajectory. At least in Alabama, Black Primitives seemed to be less pessimistic than their white counterparts. These Primitives participated in "broader civic, educational, and religious efforts" (p. 101). Although sectarian, they "moved nimbly between black Calvinistic sectarianism and optimistic ecumenism (p. 107).
Church historians will benefit from reading this volume and its alternative presentation of religious life. As important as institutions and theology are, there is a place to contemplate how religious feeling can shape religious decisions.--Reviewed by Michael A. Dain, associate professor of religion, Wayland Baptist University, Lubbock, Texas
Guthman, Joshua. Strangers below: Primitive Baptists and American culture
A.C. Greene
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 53.7 (Mar. 2016): p1070.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
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Guthman, Joshua. Strangers below: Primitive Baptists and American culture. North Carolina, 2015. 219p bibl index afp ISBN 9781469624860 pbk, $27.95; ISBN 9781469624877 ebook, $22.99
(cc) 53-3195
BX6383
2015-18762 CIP
In this study of Primitive Baptists--one of the South's most distinctive religious bodies--historian Guthman (Berea College) shows just how contested and contingent the regions eventual commitment to evangelicalism was. Briefly the victors in local disputes over polity and theology, in the early 19th century the committed Calvinists of the region's Baptist churches scorned evangelicalism and revivalism as artificial theologies that elevated human power and wisdom above God's. Primitive Baptists lost their campaign against capitalized, commodified Christianity, but Guthman shows that their plaintive, yearning sense of uncertainty lived on even in the era of self-assured evangelicals, first in the unique and heretofore unstudied Calvinism of freed slaves, and later in the region's white musical culture. If the Primitive Baptists were relegated to the margins in a region that would soon seem oppressively, homogeneously evangelical, their melancholy mode of unaccompanied call-and-response singing nonetheless suffused southern musical culture in the lonesome sound of musicians like Ralph Stanley and Roscoe Holcomb. Guthman's haunting, poetic style is perfectly matched to his subjects, and the book is not only an important contribution to southern religious history but also a delight to read. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. All levels/ libraries.--A. C. Greene, Mississippi State University
Review of Strangers Below
By David York
Joshua Guthman’s book, Strangers Below: Primitive Baptists and American Culture, tells the story of a small, fairly obscure, group of Southern Calvinistic Christians called the Primitive Baptists (as the title well implies). Although Guthman’s book uses the Primitive Baptists to trace a part of the American Calvinist experience in order to demonstrate how it shaped the Second Great Awakening and the post-World War II folk revival, Strangers Below also demonstrates that the Bible Belt was formed in the fire of religious schism. Strangers Below, spans from 1803 to the near present by portraying the stories of people and events that helped shape this time in American history. While tracing the lives of the Primitive Baptist Church members, Strangers Below illuminates the stories of the members of this nearly overlooked tradition. These stories are ones of struggle, loneliness and doubt. Guthman does an excellent job of painting the emotions and lives of the people he has studied with a great amount of color, while expertly presenting facts that many other historians have seen as hopelessly obscure or simply insignificant. Despite the fact that this is a distinctly historical text, the words on the pages of Strangers Below come together to personalize history, something not always accomplished by historical work.
The uniqueness of Strangers Below comes chiefly from its study of the Primitive Baptists who, until recently, have had little to no importance cast upon them by historical scholarship. This book argues that they are of importance and are even key to understanding American Calvinism and the various internal disagreements that shaped much of the American religious scene. Guthman uses the lives of some of these people to show how their religious thought influenced their mood and how that, in turn, can help us to see religion as a changing system of practices and attitude. The book also connects this network of change to the internal conflict of the church that revolved around the formation of the Bible Belt. Effectively, the book seeks to challenge the reader to think in new ways about the Bible Belt’s formation and about American Calvinism as a whole. In this goal, Strangers Below undeniably succeeds and pushes the reader toward further knowledge and greater understanding of the subject.
Through their musical practices, Guthman demonstrates, the Primitive Baptists continue their ideology into the modern era. Strangers Below emphasizes that music was one of the believer’s ways of talking and pleading with God. This music resonates with sounds of loneliness and, at times, even despair. Guthman uses the music, as well as some of its best musicians, such as Roscoe Holcomb, to show how the music has kept the Primitive thought and mood alive well into the modern era. Guthman also mentions how this sound has not only permeated the music scene but how its lonesome noise has filtered over into film, the prime example being O Brother, Where Art Thou?
As a whole, Strangers Below is a unique and interesting tale of a group that almost escaped notice from academia. This scholarly work’s use of primary and secondary sources helps to weave a previously untold tale that sparks interest and intrigue within the reader. As Guthman tells the story of the lonesome pilgrim of the Primitive Baptist, the reader is thrust into the melancholy mood of this Calvinistic religion. With this understanding comes the challenge to think about the Bible Belt’s formation and American Calvinism in new ways. Strangers Below has an elegantly constructed argument that does an outstanding job of proving the book’s thesis, challenging the reader and placing a great amount of life and color into lives past.
Guthman, Joshua. Strangers Below: Primitive Baptists and American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.
More about Strangers Below at http://joshuaguthman.com/