I first encountered the work of John Corrigan in graduate school. Catherine L. Albanese had assigned his book Business of the Heart in a seminar I was taking. I loved the book, but also felt troubled by it. It focused on religious revivals, a topic I was very interested in. But his approach to revival was clearly not my approach to revival. Corrigan used a mid-nineteenth century religious awakening to offer a compelling and innovative look at a subject I had never considered historically—emotions. Corrigan was asking different questions of his sources than I did, and as a result, he came to very different conclusions than I would have.
More than a decade later, I read an advance draft of Emptiness: Feeling Christian in America. The University of Chicago Press asked me for a blurb for the book, but what I sent was not exactly what made the actual dust jacket. The final version of the blurb reads, “In this sweeping study of emptiness in American Christianity, Corrigan masterfully navigates difficult terrain, expertly ushering readers through centuries of religious behavior and across many traditions. With depth and creativity, he explores everything from the diaries of conflicted Puritans to Catholic Mel Gibson's cinematic bloodletting. This is a powerful history.”
But there is an emptiness here. The blurb I submitted to the press included an additional phrase: “from the agonizing diaries of conflicted Puritans to evangelicals filling God-shaped spiritual holes with sex to Catholic Mel Gibson's cinematic bloodletting.” This omission is significant. This book pushes boundaries and forces us to be uncomfortable with our preconceptions about American Christianities. But highlighting God-shaped sex holes may not have been a selling-point for the press. The marketing team probably did not want to advertise that Corrigan was going to make readers uncomfortable. But making readers uncomfortable is exactly what Corrigan has spent a career doing. He makes them uncomfortable by challenging them, by pushing them, by driving them to see old ideas and old sources through new eyes. In fact, this is one of the many things that Corrigan does best.
In Emptiness, Corrigan evades any simple definition of, or approach to, emptiness. “The culture of emptiness among Christians,” he argues, “is complex, varies, and constantly changing. It impresses as a process made up of many interconnected moving parts.”Footnote 2 And yet Corrigan's analysis of these many moving parts in their many contexts is what makes this such a refreshingly provocative book. “Viewing the history of Christianity in America,” he explains, “as the promotion of the feeling of emptiness turns our attention away from historical narratives that recount the progressive enlargement, refinement, alternation, erasure, and reinvention of a certain ‘positive’ core set of principles and beliefs thought to comprise the essence of Christianity. It alternately evokes fluidity, indefiniteness, contradictoriness, paradox, the anxious construction of appearances, the unreliability of language, and preoccupations with failure and loss.”Footnote 3 Corrigan does this with chapters on feeling, body, space, time, and believers.
To make these arguments and to do this analysis, Corrigan marshals an impressive amount of evidence. He has carefully mined both primary and secondary sources. He has engaged with the work of historians, theologians, and philosophers. And he carefully navigates through time, from the colonial era to the present. This is impressive scholarship. Corrigan has done exactly what he set out to do in crafting his arguments. For the remainder of my review, I am going to discuss some of the key themes and issues raised by this book. Then I will highlight a few of the many issues inspired by Corrigan's analysis that I hope future scholars will tackle as they engage with his arguments. Like all good historians, Corrigan raises many new questions in the process of seeking to answer others.
Corrigan's discussion of the body and its relation to emptiness is smart and insightful. One of the issues he covers here is sex. “Sex between a man and a woman,” Corrigan tells us, with just a glint of irony, “became a threesome with an invisible God who filled both human souls with joy just as they were emptying into him and each other.”Footnote 4 One particular expression of Christianity that Corrigan highlights here is that practiced by modern evangelicals. They seem somewhat obsessed with trying to fill their “spiritual holes.” In fact, the contemporary Christian music group Plumb released a song in 1999 entitled “God-Shaped Hole.” The lyrics refer to “a God-shaped hole in all of us,” a “void only he can fill.” What is this song about, if not sex? Rather than succumb to quick and easy, amateurish Freudian analysis of such sentiments, Corrigan provides a larger context for thinking about, and pushing his reader to think about, these issues. They are part of a much deeper history of emptiness.
But filling spiritual holes is not all American Christians have sought to do. According to Corrigan, they have also yearned to fill physical holes. Well, at least some holes. Corrigan tells us that some Christians see female reproductive organs as “empty” and in need of filling. Here, Corrigan could have pushed his analysis further. Sex seems to complicate Christians' feeling of emptiness in lots of profound and perhaps contradictory ways. But taking Corrigan's analysis to its logical conclusion, if we look at this subject in terms of biology and anatomy—in terms of sex parts as some of his subjects do—how do Christian men get “filled”? Is there an extension of this logic that might be relevant to Christian men engaged in same-sex relations? Can they fill holes for God?
Corrigan also focuses on another important subject, and this one is not for the squeamish—blood. He moves carefully from explorations of saintly devotion to Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. But in watching him do his analysis, I occasionally had to stop myself. The old scholarly question kept popping up in my head, an emptiness in my mind was yearning to be filled. Where is the line between the psychotic and the spiritual? Or is there such a line? Is there something happening here on a psychological level that is worth exploring? Is emptiness also about filling not just perceived spiritual needs but also serious psychological deficiencies? How as historians and scholars studying emotions do we make such distinctions?
At the end of Corrigan's discussion of the body, he briefly raises what I suspect is a very important issue, and one that I wish he had spent more time on—that of the relationship of consumer culture to spiritual emptiness. Corrigan notes that Americans get empty so that they can fill themselves up with stuff. I suspect there is a lot more to say here. I wonder if we can connect Christianity's success in the US with consumer capitalism? I hope and trust that other scholars will develop this a lot further. I suspect they will.
Glossolalia also plays a role in Corrigan's analysis. However, he sees speaking in tongues as a fullness, as the breaking of an emptiness, the end of a silence. But I am not so sure. Speaking in tongues is also about emptying oneself of human language and cognition, of rationality. It's a leap of faith, trusting the spirit to take over the body. It is, as Corrigan notes, about empty words, but it's also about having an empty spirit. This is a perfect example of the power of this book. That I am thinking this way is a testament to the power of Corrigan's arguments. I have never before looked for emptiness in American Christianity; now I cannot help but see it everywhere.
Corrigan's discussions of space, and especially empty space, were also excellent. Another source he could have drawn on to further illustrate his arguments is the popular devotional Streams in the Desert. This is a bestselling book intended to show how God fills Christians' emptiness, he offers them daily streams of fulfillment and encouragement in the desert of life. Yet Corrigan made me wonder if there is more work to do here. Might we look for an ecological history of Christian emptiness? Do ideas about post-apocalyptic wastelands and Christian emptiness have something in common? Should we connect Jesus's wilderness wanderings with the Hunger Games? Perhaps.
The most obvious and common Christian metaphor involving emptiness and fullness has to do with the spirit. The concept of being spirit-filled is another extremely important issue that this book raises. One has to empty the self to make room for the Holy Spirit. But what happens if one becomes too empty? What happens if one is possessed by the wrong spirit? What if a Christian becomes demon possessed? This was a real concern in the 1980s and 1990s. Christians recognized a dark side to emptying the self, especially if that Christian was consulting a Ouija board or playing Dungeons and Dragons. Empty souls could be vulnerable souls.
In making all of these arguments and focusing on all of these issues, Corrigan had to be selective. He did what he did well. And yet there are both costs and benefits to all of our approaches to narrating the past. I have highlighted many of the benefits of Corrigan's approach; now I want to turn to some of the costs. One issue that the book mostly elides is that of class. Can a Christian afford to empty him/herself if he/she has nothing? Is this really a book about just middle class Christianities, or is it a book about all Christianities? How might the role of class make a difference? Second, Corrigan chose to organize his material thematically rather than chronologically (in contrast with Business of the Heart). This allows him to span space and time in creative and significant ways and to see themes that emerge in many different contexts. However, this means that there is little nuance and almost no attention to specific eras or regions. There is little acknowledgment of the American Revolution, World War II, the market revolutions, or the massive changes in technology and science, to name a few examples. How did these pivotal events in American history change Christians' conceptions of emptiness? Third, I had questions about specific religious movements and the varying identities of the book's subjects who all reside under Corrigan's “Christian” umbrella. Is this book about “feeling Christian” or about competing Christianities? Is this book about conflict or consensus? And finally, what (if anything) is Christian vs. American about the issues Corrigan raises in this book? Could he write the same book about emptiness in European, Asian, African, or Latin American Christianities?
The number of provocative questions that Corrigan raises in Emptiness is a testament to the strength and clarity of his arguments. This is a smart, original, and innovative book. I have no doubt that scholars will be wrestling with the ideas Corrigan raises here for many years to come.
