"I Just Felt Called . . .": Oral History and the Meaning of Faith
in American Religious History

Tracy E. K'Meyer

In 1944 Harry Atkinson, a white Southern Baptist, left seminary and went to work and live at Koinonia Farm, an interracial Christian cooperative community in southwest Georgia. Half a century later Atkinson struggled to explain why he left his family and comfortable future as a minister to fight racism by daily violating Jim Crow laws. Neither his childhood nor his family background could explain his decision, he asserted; his brother remained conservative on racial and social issues. Rather, he remembered reading the New Testament while serving as an air warden during World War II and realizing Christ taught that violence was never justified. He also recalled how a lecture about the church's duty to care for the poor and homeless made him want to be a minister. As for the specific decision to go to Koinonia, Atkinson concluded simply that he had been "called."1	1
This interview moment demonstrates the benefits and methodological challenges of using oral sources in the study of American religion. By encouraging interviewees to reflect on their beliefs and motivations, scholars can explore the nature of personal faith, the connection between faith and behavior, and the role of religion in historical events. The exchange raises, however, the question of how to investigate something as private as faith, in particular how to talk to people about religion and interpret their responses. This essay will review the contributions made to the study of modern American religion by scholars who use oral sources, the variety of archival oral history collections currently available for use, and some methodological issues involved in conducting interviews about religious belief.	2
Although American religious history has undergone a renaissance in the past twenty years, most new research focuses on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.2 In attempting to explain why fewer scholars have studied recent religious history, Harry S. Stout and Robert M. Taylor Jr. suggest that "the concept (and perhaps the reality) of secularization has turned historians away from the study of twentieth-century religion." So convinced have scholars been that faith is no longer a vital factor in American life that "nearly all creative methodology and influential writing in American religious history has concentrated on premodern topics."3 Moreover, much of the research on the twentieth century focuses on leaders, institutions, and major denominations, in a top-down approach that relies on denominational publications and records.4 Some scholars have also argued that, compared to the work on previous centuries, religion is less well integrated into historical narratives of the post-1930 period.5	3
Recent studies by anthropologists, sociologists, and folklorists that incorporate oral sources have contributed to an interdisciplinary revival and diversification of twentieth-century American religious history.6 Most recent work concerns religious groups outside or at the margins of the denominational mainstream. This interest reflects the changing nature of American religion—formerly marginal groups such as charismatics have become more central—and contemporary historians' desire to document the experience of minorities. A second major development is the increased attention to popular religion, the everyday religious thinking and behavior of laymen and laywomen, especially practices that take place outside of institutions and without the sanction of church authorities.7 Finally, scholars are beginning to investigate how events transform personal faith and religious institutions and how individual believers and religious groups effect social change. Oral history contributes to each of these trends but holds particular promise for studies of the private nature and meaning of religious belief, the interconnections between belief and public action, and the place of religion in broader historical narratives.	. . .