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Please note: Contrary to Sutton's account, Mathewes–Green does not say that Ketchell is Catholic; she quotes, parenthetically, what he said himself about his family background. Nor does she suggest that this background accounts for his conceptual muddles, any more than it accounts for his mangling of the English language.
There is more to be said in this vein, but let's move ahead to the conclusion of Sutton's rejoinder:
In sum, what Wilson has ignored in his blog is the point of my criticism of Mathewes–Green's review. He can take his shots at me, as Mathewes–Green took her shots at Ketchell, but these have nothing to do with the fact that Mathewes–Green, in her effort to position Holy Hills as on the wrong side of the culture wars, completely missed Ketchell's argument. Holy Hills is an important book that, mixed metaphors aside, makes a significant contribution to the scholarship on American religion.
OK. The whiny rhetoric—"taking shots"!—doesn't exactly invite further engagement, but I think this conclusion nevertheless points the way forward. What appears to be an impasse may not be the end–point after all.
If you read Mathewes–Green's piece, with its extensive quotations from Ketchell, you are probably wondering what on earth Sutton meant when he said, in his initial response, "That Mathews–Green read this book through the lens of the culture wars tells us a whole lot more about her than it does about Ketchell's brilliant, engaging book." Isn't it clear that Ketchell himself repeatedly casts Branson in precisely such terms? And if you actually read Holy Hills of the Ozarks, that impression would be confirmed.
So is Sutton simply obtuse, or disingenuous? No. Here is the context of his judgment, at least as I understand it. Ketchell's book is representative of a broad trend in the study of American religion, and in particular the study of conservative Protestant believers—fundamentalists, evangelicals, Pentecostals. A growing number of scholars have produced what might be called ethnographic studies of such believers, seeking to understand how they construct their shared social world. Susan Friend Harding's The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics and Mitchell Stevens' Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement (which considers both religious and nonreligious homeschooling advocates) are two examples among many, and within this broad trend there are many subdivisions (emphasis on "material culture," for instance). But what links most of these books is an effort to understand.
Understand what? Well, in part the trend reflects the collapse of secularization theory (which still has its defenders, yes) and the simplistic understanding of "modernity" that went with it. So many of these studies seek to understand how various religious groups that were supposed to wither away are in fact negotiating the challenges of modernity. And for many—though by no means all—of the scholars working in this vein, the ideal is a kind of sympathetic detachment from the object of research, a studied "neutrality." But this ideal is in tension with another influential trend in the study of religion and in the academy today more broadly, encouraging "committed" scholarship. (If we do carry the conversation on, this would be one subject to pursue. Another would be Ketchell's almost complete failure to live up to his claim in the introduction—repeated elsewhere—that his study "broaches the many ways that tourists have utilized Branson's ontological fables and accompanying ideological constructs to conceivably refashion their nonvacation lives.")
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