{"id":1531,"date":"2013-03-09T16:57:00","date_gmt":"2013-03-09T16:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/03\/exhibiting-faith-religion-public-history-part-1.html"},"modified":"2013-03-09T16:57:00","modified_gmt":"2013-03-09T16:57:00","slug":"exhibiting-faith-religion-public-history-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2013\/03\/exhibiting-faith-religion-public-history-part-1.html","title":{"rendered":"Exhibiting Faith: Religion & Public History, Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Historical Boston is held together by a thin red line. Running along the city\u2019s cobblestone sidewalks from Boston Common to the Charlestown Navy Yard, this painted path binds scattered sites related to Revolutionary-era Boston into a historic district known as the\u00a0<\/span>\u201cFreedom Trail.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0Seemingly every iconic moment of America\u2019s founding is included on this red line of liberty: Bunker Hill, Faneuil Hall, Paul Revere\u2019s house, and the site of the Boston Massacre. But as anyone who has actually traversed the trail\u2019s two-and-a-half-mile expanse knows, the Freedom Trail also includes a number of prominent religious sites. Indeed, seven of the trail\u2019s seventeen landmarks have some kind of religious significance. From the King\u2019s Chapel Burying Ground to Park Street Church, the Freedom Trail makes clear that the conservation of religious landmarks is intimately a part of\u00a0<\/span>\u201cpreserving the story of the American Revolution.\u201d<\/a>

Now to claim as the Freedom Trail does that religious institutions have shaped American history should come as no surprise\u2014especially to the readers of this blog. As historian\u00a0<\/span>Heather Curtis<\/a>\u00a0smartly argued a while back in an essay on\u00a0<\/span>Massachusetts<\/a>\u00a0for\u00a0<\/span>Religion & Politics<\/a><\/i>\u2019\u00a0<\/span>\u201cStates of the Union Project,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0Boston\u2019s Freedom Trail is perhaps the ideal metaphor for unpacking religion\u2019s place in America\u2019s past. But there is another reading of the sacred addresses along this patriotic pathway; an approach that looks forward as well as back. For as much as the Freedom Trail\u2019s churches underscore religion\u2019s importance to America\u2019s past, they also reveal religion\u2019s centrality to how contemporary Americans collectively remember, publicly commemorate, and culturally construct that past today. And this goes well beyond old Boston. Religion saturates the American commemorative landscape. From the historic markers affixed to old village churches, to the exhibits at denominational archives, to the to the Creation Museum, institutions, experiences, and ideas marked as religious both inform and animate America\u2019s relationship with its past. Even a pseudo-museum like Disney World\u2019s Hall of Presidents, as our own Elesha Coffman pointed out in a\u00a0<\/span>recent post<\/a>, is permeated by spiritual themes like redemption and pastoral care. Religion, in short, saturates American public history.<\/span><\/span>

<\/span><\/span>Read the rest here<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Historical Boston is held together by a thin red line. Running along the city\u2019s cobblestone sidewalks from Boston Common to the Charlestown Navy Yard, this painted path binds scattered sites related to Revolutionary-era Boston into a historic district known as the\u00a0\u201cFreedom Trail.\u201d\u00a0Seemingly every iconic moment of America\u2019s founding is included on this red line of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2251,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nExhibiting Faith: Religion & Public History, Part 1<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Historical Boston is held together by a thin red line. 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