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

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 churchs 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."' 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. Although American religious history has undergone a renaissance in the past twenty years, most new research focuses on the eighteenth and nineteenth centu-