It was a sobering experience to discuss David Chappell’s phenomenal A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (UNC Press, 2004) with my graduate students the week before the election. (Well, the week before the election is sobering whatever you read.) The book is a great text to dissect in a seminar: it has a provocative thesis, it drips with theoretical precision, and the prose are (mostly) clear. It makes great points not only about the importance of prophetic religion to the Civil Rights leaders, but also the surprising impotence of the southern Christian churches when segregationalists required the support; in the end, the Civil Rights protesters won because they had religious tools at their disposal, while the segregationalists could not marshal ecclesiastical back-up like southerners had during the nineteenth century. It helps, in a seminar on religion in American history, to discuss a book that foregrounds the significance of religion to one of our nation’s most important moment. (It also has a very brief essay on materialistic and ideological methodologies as an appendix, which jolted some good conversation.) We had some good debates and disagreements, but overall it was well received and I plan to use it again in the future.

But that portion of Chappell’s narrative wasn’t what really grabbed me this time. Rather, I was struck—indicted, even—by his discussion of the limits of liberal politics and the progressive ideology. Here is a passage from the introduction:

The black southern movement’s political successes depended on an alliance with northern liberals. Yet the liberals’ animating faith was radically different from that of the southern movement. Liberals believed in the power of human reason to overcome “prejudice” and other vestiges of superstitious, unenlightened past. Liberals believed…that “progress” was under way: further education, along with economic development, would lead white southerners to abandon their irrational traditions. Therefore liberals, though sincere in their devotion to black rights, did not see any reason to do anything drastic to promote them. Indeed, they thought that pushing too hard for black rights would provoke a violent reaction in the backward white South.

On the other hand,

The black movement’s nonviolent soldiers were driven not by modern liberal faith in human reason, but by older, seemingly more durable prejudices and superstitions that were rooted in Christian and Jewish myth…[They] believed that the natural tendency of this world and of human institutions (including churches) is toward corruption. Like the Hebrew Prophets, these thinkers believed that they could not expect that world and those institutions to improve. Nor could they be passive bystanders. They had to stand apart from society and insult it with skepticism about its pre-tensions to justice and truth. They had to instigate catastrophic changes in the minds of whoever would listen, and they accepted that only a few outcasts might listen.

A few thoughts. First, I love it when historical books make profound points that transcend the particular topic they are discussing. Second, this highlighted once again for me the lack of a religious core for the modern American left–we have lost the prophetic voice that animated some of the most profound political moments of progressive history. And third, and most poignantly, it reminded me of how easy it is slip back into privileged complacency when it comes to my progressive values. I assume the world is improving and bending toward justice. I am often fine with incremental changes. I get frustrated with Bernie Bros who seem to be instigating for more than our nation is currently ready to embrace.

I realized that we still have two prominent voices even within America’s black tradition: on the one hand, we have the optimistic Obama, whose The Audacity of Hope is a textbook for the classic liberal imagination and commitment to successive progress. His presidency has been criticized—and often rightly so—for not taking the radical action that the left assumed he’d inaugurate. He is far too staid, too resolute, and too hesitant. On the other hand, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me embodies the pessimism that reflects a corrupt world requiring revolutionary action. In many ways, Coates speaks for millions of disenfranchised Americans not satisfied with the incremental progress in the Age of Obama.

Ironically, Coates’s utter lack of religion in his narrative demonstrates the long distance the American left and the progressive movement has come since the theologically drenched Civil Rights protesters.

There is no element of modern America that assaults the liberal belief in steady progress than the Rise of Trump. The racist, misogynist, bigoted, backward, and xenophobic factions of our nation’s society—particulars that have never disappeared yet remained on the outskirts of respectability—demonstrate the frustrating limits of the liberal imagination. And these wounds will remain long after whatever happens next Tuesday.

In order to confront these demons, perhaps it is time to resurrect our prophetic voice.

Last weekend, at a lecture delivered by David F. Holland (video should be forthcoming!), BYU celebrated the tenth anniversary of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Studies. The creation of the MI was the result of bringing together a number of activities at BYU, including the Foundation of Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, the Dead Sea Scrolls Project, and the Middle Eastern Text Initiative, among other projects. If you are interested in some background to how these type of ancient studies projects took root at BYU, I recommend Eric F. Mason’s “The Saints and the Scrolls: LDS Engagement with mainstream Dead Sea Scrolls Scholarship and Its Implication” (in this volume). In many ways, what the MI is now is an extension of that Dead Sea Scrolls project: an academic initiative aimed to build bridges with the broader scholarly world. Even as projects under the MI umbrella have developed, evolved, and transformed, that broad mission has remained the same.

Spencer Fluhman, a history professor and mentor for a majority of young LDS academics, became the institute’s newest director this year. It would have been impossible to name a better person. Fluhman taught the first class I attended when I went to BYU and opened my eyes to the academic study of religion, so I’m biased. But he also wrote a phenomenal book and is well-integrated into the scholarly community. He is also committed to the split focus of the MI, in which they aim to reach both academics as well as the faithful. Just take a look at his state-of-the-institute address he delivered last Saturday:

Can you feel that the time is ripe for more vigorous engagement? We can. In graduate school, I had an advisor who was Jewish, and he taught me a really important truth about our religious community. Noticing the work of several young LDS historians, he quipped to me one afternoon, “You all have been parrying the sword thrusts so long that you’re only now starting to take serious stock of yourselves.” As my colleague (and Maxwell Institute author) Patrick Mason has said, “in 2016 it’s not about survival any more.” The pressing question for Latter-day Saint scholars now seems to be, “Can we contribute?” To contribute, we must be in the conversations. We must engage those outside our own religious community. We’ve seen Latter-day Saints in business and politics do just that. The Maxwell Institute proposes to support LDS scholars in fields related to religion so they can contribute enduring work in the broader world of research and ideas.

I didn’t think it was possible for a text to capture the enthusiasm with which Fluhman lectures, but that comes close to doing his charisma justice.

But what also makes Fluhman perfect for the position is his commitment to doing work that furthers the LDS tradition. Again from his address:

One of the key insights of what we might call the “postmodern” academy is that knowledge doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Human learning and reason do not exist outside of time and space, somehow immune from culturally rooted values or perspectives. In light of that insight, I unreservedly claim that statement from Elder Maxwell as the context for all the work of the Institute that bears his name, the Neal A. Maxwell Institute. Accordingly, we can never be “neutral.” We pursue scholarship in light of that “redeeming presence,” that “preeminent and imperial” “grand fact” of divine love. It fuels our rigor, it prompts our generosity, and it fires our collective imagination.

This is the blend of faithful and rigor that is required at BYU’s institution. The MI’s advisory board, also revealed last weekend, demonstrates the bridge between academic and ecclesiastic worlds.

There will always be limits for what a BYU institution could do. Fluhman knows that. But there is still a critical function that a center like the MI can play in the modern Mormon tradition. Besides the well-regarded Middle Eastern Texts Initiative, which provides dual-language publications of important documents translated and edited by leading scholars in the field, they have similar initiatives focused on Christian texts, the Book of Mormon, and Mormon studies. They have a number of journals and book series on Mormon-related topics. (Disclaimer: I’m an associate editor with their Mormon Studies Review.) I’ve been especially thrilled with their Living Faith book series, which I believe to be the model of how LDS scholars can speak to a non-scholarly audience. (I’m only a few pages into the brand-new book by Ashley Mae Hoiland, One Hundred Birds Taught Me to Fly, and it’s fantastic.) Currently, the publishing arm of the institute is both prolific and rigorous–a very rare combination.

Kudos to the Maxwell Institute for their good work. The future appears bright.

[This past week I had the privilege of participating on a panel about academic blogging at the United States Intellectual History conference. It was a fabulous conversation, and a phenomenal conference overall. A few people asked for me to post my remarks, which I thought was appropriate given it was about blogging. So here are my introductory comments about the origins and purpose of The Junto: A Group Blog on Early American History. I fear this might be whetting your whistle, however, since the real great ideas came from the other panelists as well as during the engaging Q&A period. Perhaps at some point I’ll post further reflections.]

I originally conceived of The Junto because studying early American history at the University of Cambridge could be quite lonely at times. I had wonderful advisers, and a large American history graduate cohort, but there were only a few students writing dissertations on American topics prior to the Civil War. The nearest hub for early American discussion was at Oxford, but they were three hours away and wore the wrong shade of blue.

This issue became even more pronounced while I was in Boston on a fellowship, where I was wowed by the camaraderie amongst junior scholars. Frequent colloquiums, lectures, brownbags, workshops and book groups made it possible to feel like you were really part of a broader community. I was participating in a weekly seminar at the New-York Historical Society where we held vibrant conversations on crucial historical and historiographical topics. It reaffirmed to me how important dialogue was to our scholarly world. The juxtaposition to what I was experiencing across the ocean could not have been more stark. I felt I had to find a way to transfer this communal experience back to Cambridge. Drawing on my experience with Juvenile Instructor, another successful blog on academic topics, I envisioned a new group blog on early American history. I therefore approached about a dozen acquaintances, several of whom were in the NYHS seminar, and The Junto was born.

When recruiting original contributors, I felt it important to set a tone from the very beginning. If you look at the academic blogosphere, including those on this very panel, there is a wide spectrum of expectations. On the one end, and the USIH blog is a good example, you have polished essays that contribute not only original but substantive content, and the only thing that separates them from published articles are time and space. Their posts are typically deep in content and long on length. Further, with a small number of writers who post nearly every week, you are able to get an overall arc and long-form analysis. It is difficult to rival the quality of the USIH blog. On the other end of the spectrum (not of quality, but of approach), often exemplified by personal blogs or websites with few and sometimes infrequent posts, content is often more brief, reactionary, and excerpted. Think of a scrapbook. John Fea’s blog is perhaps the best example of this approach. Both of these ends of the spectrum serve important, if different, purposes.

I wanted The Junto to be something in the middle. While using a conversational tone, our blog aims to be more of an engaging dialogue rather than merely a smart monologue. If USIH is a quality conference paper, we try to be a provocative roundtable. Prepared and measured, yes, but often with a goal of sparking interaction, rather than giving conclusive findings. We try to publicize the dialogic nature of scholarly development, revealing how academic work is best cultivated in a community rather than alone.

But more than just a means to creating scholarship, our blog is devoted to the community in its own right. One of my mentors, Richard Bushman, has emphasized the attention we should give to making scholarship an act of friendship. We do this both through participation as well as tone. We’ve invited scores of guest posts and round tables, and our comment threads often work as a venue for networking. Though we haven’t done this much in the past, the few times we have organized meet-ups at conferences have been profoundly successful. (We will likely do more of that in the future.) While the geographic spaces for early American scholarship have previously revolved around institutions like he McNeil Center and Omohundro Institute, blogs can serve as a supplemental form of academic hubs.

And then there’s our very discourse. We have long maintained what I call a playfully irreverent tone, as seen in our humorous footnotes and infrequent memes. One of our most popular features is our March Madness tournament which we hold every year, where readers vote on their favorite book and articles. (We typically get several thousand participants.) It’s both playful in seeing people get excited for their choices, but in the end provides a large database of resources for people years later. (On a typical week we may see dozens of visitors reading posts from these tournaments that are more than a year old.)

I could say more about what we aim to do. Hopefully we have time to discuss pedagogy, which I believe is a critical part of our platform. I also hope we have a chance to discuss the pitfalls of the Junto and other blogs when it comes to replicating the lack of diversity in our broader academy. But for now, I’ll leave my opening comments here.

The Mormon Moment refuses to die.

This morning we woke to news that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are currently polled to split the Utah Vote at 26% each. This comes in the wake of the LDS-owned newspaper Deseret News printing a nearly-unprecedented op-ed calling for Trump to resign in light of recently released audio of him bragging about sexually assaulting women. A score of elected GOP officials in the state have similarly rescinded support for their party’s nominee. For one of the most Republican states in the nation, that is news enough. Max Mueller and McKay Coppins have written about Trump’s “Mormon problem,” which I believe is mostly rooted in the LDS tradition’s conflation of character and principles: while Evangelicals, it seems, have largely been willing to overlook Trump’s personality problems as long as he reaffirms a commitment to a certain matrix of policies, Mormons aren’t as willing to make the same compromise. Max quoted me in brief in his essay, but here was my longer answer to his question (which I hurriedly wrote on my phone while at an event, so it’s a miracle he could even salvage one sentence):

The Book of Mormon emphasizes the importance of righteous leaders, and so members are the faith have long believed that heads of state should represent the values of a righteous nation. This commitment can often be fungible, of course, due to the nature of partisan politics and the monopoly the Republican Party currently holds over American Mormons. But Utah’s hesitancy toward Trump demonstrates that they’re not fully committed to policies over character. The Church’s attachment to the Republican Party was largely centered on the conservative values of the religious right in the wake of the culture wars, so as long as Republicans supported those ethics they could mostly escape censure on other, more questionable, opinions. Opposing immigration, distrusting minorities, and trumpeting patriarchal values fit into that narrative, for instance, but directly disparaging family values rooted in white, middle-class ideals will likely prove a step too far.

But enough about Mormonism’s opposition to Trump.

What is more striking about this recent round of Utah polling, I think, is the leap made by third-party candidate Evan McMullin in Utah’s polls. A BYU alum who is a former CIA operative, investment banker, and policy director for the GOP, McMullin started his long-shot campaign with zero name recognition and based his run primarily on a principled stand against the two mainstream party’s candidates. He has never claimed a hope to gain 271 electoral college votes, but rather made clear that his goal is to win at least one state, keep Clinton and Trump from winning outright, and then lobby for the House of Representatives to choose him over the two “undesirable” nominees. It’s a pipe dream, of course, but it is most optimistically seen as a principled protest vote for those who cannot stomach voting for candidates they find revolting. (A lot has been written on the Mormon revulsion to Trump, but an equal amount of words can be spent talking about their similar hatred for the Clintons.) Even while Libertarian candidate and former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson is a more viable option, Mormons are especially drawn to the protest candidate who better embodies their religious and ideological ideals. One meme that has been frequenting Mormon social media, and has mostly been debunked, is a past Mormon prophet Ezra Taft Benson saying that a “vote for the lesser of two evils” is “still voting for evil.” Even if they don’t know much else about McMullin and his policies, they know this: he represents Mormon values. He is a Mormon, after all.

Protest candidates are not new for Mormons. Their founder, Joseph Smith, ran a quixotic presidential campaign in 1844 which many scholars see as a “protest” candidacy. But even more common for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been a commitment to voting as a group for the candidate who they believe represents their best values. They believe America to be a chosen, divine nation, so they believe its leaders should best represent those spiritual principles. In the Nauvoo years this meant bloc voting. In the Utah years this meant establishing their own political operation, the People’s Party. As a result, one could count on the “Mormon vote” going one particular direction throughout the nineteenth century. (And as I wrote about last week, this played into public perceptions about the “church broke” Mormon politicians.)

As part of the compromises the LDS Church made to become part of the American political body at the turn of the twentieth century, the People’s Party disappeared and the Mormons embraced the two-party system. (There were even a string of pamphlets and a vibrant public debate over “Why the Mormons should vote Democrat” or “Why the Mormons should vote Republican.”) But as the decades evolved, Utah’s vote transitioned as well. While the state voted for Franklin D. Roosevelt all four times he was on the ballot—and in those latter years, against the explicit counsel of LDS leadership—after World War II, and especially following the culture wars, the “Mormon vote” became more or less synonymous with the “Republican Vote.” This was primarily due to a vocal LDS leadership who echoed anti-communistic policies and anti-liberal social ideas, but it was also rooted the demographic make-up of Utah that positioned them with similar states in the post-war era. Pew polling from the past year revealed Mormons to be the most Republican religion in the nation. That is what makes their opposition to Trump so remarkable.

This is mostly likely a historical blip. If the GOP had nominated any of the other seventeen potential candidates who squared-off against each other in the primaries, it’s likely the Republican nominee would defeat Clinton by a very sizable margin. In four years, if the party recovers from Trump and nominates someone more in line with mainstream values and interests, Utah will likely return to being a deeply red state. The fact that Utah is just as likely to vote for McMullin, who has hardly any chance in any other state, rather than Clinton, who has the best chance to defeat Trump, is indicative. As much as I’d love to see Mormonism cultivate the radical progressive roots that are mostly latent in the tradition, it’s not likely to happen anytime soon.

However. What the opposition to Trump demonstrates is that the Mormon vote can be, in unique and perhaps drastic circumstances, divorced from the Republican vote. It may happen rarely, but it’s possible. And the fact that there is a solid chance that Utah might vote for McMullin as opposed to the more established third-party candidate, Johnson, indicates that the peculiarities of the Mormon vote are still somewhat unmatched in the rest of the American political body.

Just like Trump, the “Mormon vote” has now demonstrated its ability to be decoupled from the Republican establishment. With the ramifications of the 2016 election for the party still far from predictable, this might be a trend worth following.