I once sat in a courtroom listening to horrific crimes being read out at an arraignment. There were hundreds of crimes, and it took several hours to read them. The defendant pled guilty to them all. I was there with one of the victims and we were surrounded by other victims and/or their families. To this day it remains the most confronting context I have experienced around justice with its elements of vengeance and punishment. The plea allowed everyone to... Read more
I have written quite a bit on Freemasonry through the years, including several posts at this site. That material has a renewed significance for me given my present interests in empire, specifically American empire, with a special focus on its religious dimension. For the United States, as for the other empires of its time, Freemasonry played a critical role in the building and sustaining of empire. And by any reasonable standard, it was at its heart a religious movement, however... Read more
“But I’ll tell you what. Growing up in a small town like that, you learn how to take care of each other. That family down the road, they may not think like you do, they may not pray like you do. They may not love like you do. But they’re your neighbors. And you look out for them. And they look out for you. Everybody belongs. And everybody has a responsibility to contribute . . . Then I came back... Read more
In a recent, already field-defining, essay in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, historian Matthew Avery Sutton offers a historiography of American evangelicalism. As he explains: In the1980s, in response to the rise of the Religious Right, prominent religious historians occupying influential chairs and possessing access to institutional resources, cultivated a historical “consensus” that defined evangelicalism broadly, abstractly and optimistically, and created an unbroken lineage of both orthodoxy and orthopraxy throughout American history. However, Sutton argues, this imagined... Read more
by Janine Giordano Drake I think a lot about the Second Great Awakening. I think about its overlap with the market revolution, with the growth of Jacksonian democracy, with the rise indigenous removal and settler colonialism, and with the growth of Anti-Mormon and Anti-Catholic sentiment. But perhaps most of all, I think a lot about the role of the Second Great Awakening in forming Americans’ understandings of what a democracy looks like. Democracy, for so many Americans in the early... Read more
In recent years, American historians have reached a fair consensus that their nation’s history must be considered in terms of its being an empire, and from its earliest era. As such, we should apply to that history the insights of the modern study of empires, which is a very lively field of study. In this series of posts, I have been considering the implications for the specific theme of religion. Today I will be describing several critical aspects of that... Read more
It’s time for one of my favorite semesters for books! Every four semesters I teach what is probably my favorite class at Baylor, a graduate course entitled “Women, Gender, and Sex in American Religious History.” For one thing, it is the most fun thing to answer at a party when someone asks what you are teaching this semester. For another, I love thinking through these ideas with smart people for an entire afternoon once a week. I also enjoy the... Read more
In the 1976 presidential election, evangelicals across the political spectrum were determined to vote for the candidate who demonstrated the highest standard of integrity and the most exemplary character – not the candidate who shared their positions on policy issues. Four years earlier, more than 80 percent of white evangelical voters had cast their ballots for Richard Nixon, but after the Watergate scandal, many of them felt they had been duped. Across the spectrum, evangelicals insisted that they would... Read more
Last month, Harmeet Dhillon, an Indian American Republican leader and a devout Sikh, recited the Ardas, a Sikh prayer, during the benediction on the first night of the Republican National Convention. The backlash against Dhillon from fellow Republicans was swift and intense. On X, for example, Lauren Witzke, the 2020 Republican Senate candidate from Delaware, reposted Dhillon’s benediction and said, “How about you get deported instead, you pagan blasphemer. God saves our president and the RNC mocks him with... Read more
In a recent, already field-defining, essay in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, historian Matthew Avery Sutton offers a historiography of American evangelicalism. As he explains: In the 1980s, in response to the rise of the Religious Right, prominent religious historians occupying influential chairs and possessing access to institutional resources, cultivated a historical “consensus” that defined evangelicalism broadly, abstractly and optimistically, and created an unbroken lineage of both orthodoxy and orthopraxy throughout American history. However, Sutton argues, this... Read more
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