Although studies of Protestant Christianity have often “located” Protestantism in individuals and their interior beliefs, this panel instead frames Protestantism as a tradition that desires to plant itself in the physical world. We suggest Protestantism sustains itself through socio-material worlds, and we propose researchers will be better able to visualize Protestantism – and its effects on the late modern Western world – by mapping such Protestant worlds. The overarching question for our panel, then, is: How might we map Protestantism? We focus on North American Protestantisms (and their global reach) in the pivotal period from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, when much of the scaffolding was built for today’s disciplines of geography, history, natural science, and religious studies. The five papers discuss different map-making methods that can help researchers “see” these Protestant worlds and their effects: geographic maps; temporal charts; taxonomic catalogs; mental diagrams; and frames for scholarly visualizations.
Missionary geographic enthusiasm was a vital component of nineteenth-century missionaries’ attempts to inform the American Protestant public about the world, its people, and their supposed need for evangelism. Starting in the late 1820s, missionary leaders of Monthly Prayer Concerts turned to maps and other geographic information as a key part of the “missionary intelligence” they shared with American audiences. Maps served several purposes in missionary intelligence: to educate and entertain, to make the far away and distant feel near, and to help American Protestants take a livelier interest in the world around them. Ministers sought to harness the power of visual aids and compelling narrative to turn public educational lectures into tools for the advance of foreign missions in the world at large. But these efforts to educate Americans about the world brought missionary conceptions of the hierarchies of world religions, cultures, and race into American geographic understandings.
Recent scholarship on maps suggests we must reimagine what we think a map looks like and what a map does. Maps are lively images that can take many visual forms, perform many functions in society, and assert many different claims about the relationships between human beings and their environments. Maps can also make claims about time, articulating relationships between the past, present, and future. This paper invites scholars to rethink the significance of maps in Protestantism by examining two Bible maps from the early twentieth century: a map of “The Holy Land” in the Scofield Reference Bible of 1909 and a chart made by dispensationalist minister Clarence Larkin in 1920. Examining the materiality of these images and their functions in Protestant communities, this paper argues Bible maps and charts made distinct claims about contemporary politics, the Bible’s relationship to geography in the past and present, and the sacrality of time.
William Dawson was a staunch Presbyterian. He was also a celebrated nineteenth-century geologist, president of Montreal’s Natural History Society, and principal of McGill University. In his view, cataloging scientific specimens bolstered his faith. This paper begins by considering Dawson’s taxonomic work as a form of Protestant mapping. It then jumps to the present when it inspired my experiment organizing a new “Natural History Society” at McGill, which included scholars and artists. We presented artifacts to each other, created our own weird taxonomic maps, and made a digital pedagogy tool. The project was a “serious parody” (Wilcox 2018), a ludic protest that parodies a dominant cultural form, while gaining real insights in the process. Making our own taxonomies was also an experiential form of critique, a way to move “map” closer to “territory” in J.Z. Smith’s terms. Can it help us to reimagine complex relationships with each other and the planet?
This paper thinks diagrammatically about how to visualize Protestant subjects and subjectivities. Thinking about subjects through diagrams allows us to ask: How are subjects made in and through their spatial existence? Rather than starting from the classic trope of Protestant interior individualism, I argue diagramming is a method that can help us shift toward a deeper understanding of Protestant subjects-in-the-world. I especially build on recent scholarship on diagrams as methods of mapping in cultural anthropology, and I extend this into religious studies. When we think about subjects through the lens of space, it becomes clear the Protestant tradition incorporates a multitude of types of cartographic subjectivities. The paper discusses three example diagrams of Protestant subjectivity: the subject as concentric circles; the subject as a relational ensemble; and the subject as a friction-filled coupling.
This paper historicizes how scholars came to frame Protestantism as a disenchanted, modern religion focused on thinking about immaterial beliefs. It demonstrates that this view, although pervasive, is not inherent to Protestantism itself. This view is a modern definition of religion that took hold among freethinkers who practiced the “religion of secularism” from the 1890s onward. In cartoons, freethinkers criticized Protestantism as a material form of religion that focused too much on supernatural objects and beings. Freethinkers offered new interpretations of Enlightenment epistemologies that suggested secularism was a truly enlightened, modern religion because it focused on immaterial beliefs. Ironically, the religion of secularism informed the secular historical method, through which scholars studied Protestantism as a tradition of immaterial beliefs. This paper offers a way of remapping belief in Protestantism according to eighteenth-century Enlightenment epistemologies, which Protestants adapted to practice their enlightened, material form of religion well into the twentieth century.
| James Bielo | bielojs@miamioh.edu | View |