Benjamin E. Park

Over at The Junto I have an essay on defining “Democratic” in the long-used title, “Age of Democratic Revolutions. An excerpt:

In short, I tried to get my students to recognize the inchoate and contested nature of “democracy” during this crucial era. Far from a predetermined trajectory toward what we came to celebrate as democratic rule, it was a much more contested and topsy-turvy battle over centralized control and populist excess. We closed the semester by discussing how today’s emphasis on these “messy” origins highlights our own reservations concerning democratic practice. My conceptions of the Age of Revolutions is shaped by living in the Age of Trump.

You can read the rest of it here.

I taught a summer course at BYU at the same time as Nick Frederick once and got to know him a bit. Besides being exceptionally kind he’s also immensely smart. One of the first products of the Claremont Mormon Studies Program, Nick now teaches religion at BYU full-time. This is his first book, of which I’ve only heard great things. I’m also excited to see another book in Fairleigh Dickinson’s Mormon Studies Series. They released three last year, and I’m sure there will be more in the future. I’m especially excited to see the series’s commitment to interdisciplinary approaches–this is a far cry from the typical history titles seen in Mormon studies.

Here’s the blurb:

One of the most pertinent questions facing students of Mormon Studies is gaining further understanding of the function the Bible played in the composition of Joseph Smith’s primary compositions, the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants. With a few notable exceptions, such as Philip Barlow’s Mormons and the Bible and Grant Hardy’s Understanding the Book of Mormon, full-length monographs devoted to this topic have been lacking. This manuscript attempts to remedy this through a close analysis of how Mormon scripture, specifically the Book of Mormonand the Doctrine and Covenants, integrates the writings of New Testament into its own text. This manuscript takes up the argument that through the rhetoric of allusivity (the allusion to one text by another) Joseph Smith was able to bestow upon his works an authority they would have lacked without the incorporation of biblical language. In order to provide a thorough analysis focused on how Smith incorporated the biblical text into his own texts, this work will limit itself only to those passages in Mormon scripture that allude to the Prologue of John’s gospel (John 1:1-18). The choice of the Prologue of John is due to its frequent appearance throughout Smith’s corpus as well as its recognizable language. This study further argues that the manner in which Smith incorporates the Johannine Prologue is by no means uniform but actually quite creative, taking (at least) four different forms: Echo, Allusion, Expansion, and Inversion. The methodology used in this work is based primarily upon recent developments in intertextual studies of the Bible, an analytical method that has proved to be quite effective in studying later author’s use of earlier texts.

A couple of days ago there was a Twitter debate between historians Sam Haselby and Annette Gordon-Reed over Thomas Jefferson’s “Christianity.” Haselby wrote a great book on the origins of American religious nationalism, which I reviewed in William and Mary Quarterly, and recently wrote a provocative essay on the secularism of the American founding. Gordon-Reed, one of the masters of the historian’s craft, recently co-authored a new intellectual biography of Jefferson. I recommend the whole exchange, which is storified here. Roy Rogers also posted an important contribution to the dialogue at The Junto on the deeply religious circumstances of Virginia’s battle for religious liberty, arguing that it was far from secular. I strongly recommend reading that essay, too. And, of course, people interested in this topic should be familiar with John Fea’s excellent work.

I just want to add a few thoughts on the issue of whether Jefferson should be categorized as a “Christian.” (Coincidentally, I’ve been struggling with this type of question given my work on Theodore Parker, who also insisted on the identity even while being stripped of the title by competing religionists.)

I totally understand the desire to not cast Jefferson as a Christian. Most obviously, he held radically unorthodox beliefs, which included stripping Christ of divine salvific power and the scriptures of infallible authority. He also railed against Christian ministers in very colorful and biting language. He was far from mainstream Christianity. Further, historians are often quick to debunk the silly and juvenile arguments, pedaled by faux-historians like David Barton, that Jefferson was a proto-Evangelical and that America was founded as a Christian nation. This is all important.

But historians should also recognize that Jefferson refused to recuse the title of “Christian” himself. As Reed and Onuf’s book argued, along with James Kloppenberg’s new tome on the birth of American democracy, Jefferson believed America would become a bastion of a new rational Christianity. As I discuss with my Age of Jefferson students, Jefferson believed that the separation of Church and State would save religion as much as it did government. He believed that just as Britain had corrupted notions of freedom, so too did ministers corrupt the true idea of Christianity. I also recommend the first chapter of Stephen Prothero’s American Jesus, which posits Jefferson as the father of a particular strain of American Christian belief.

But more than just the historical argument, I worry that sometimes historians forfeit the title of “Christian” to Evangelicals like Barton.  “Christianity” was never a consistent nor coherent theology at any point in American history, as it meant a myriad of different things in a vibrant marketplace of belief. By acquiescing the title to fundamentalist evangelicals we both mask the dynamic nature of America’s religious tradition as well as overlook the influence of Protestant notions of dissent, freedom, and justice on our democratic structure. I refuse to accept a limited definition of “Christianity” propagated by those who wish to recast the Founding in the image of the Religious Right.

I think the correct way to respond to the David Bartons of the world is not to argue the founding was a “secular” moment, or even that America was anything but a Christian nation, but rather to problematize what “Christianity” means in the first place.

When I first read about the shooting incident on UCLA’s campus this morning I immediately feared that it was over a grade dispute. Especially at this time of the year, when final grades are being doled out, many professors live in fear of students literally fighting back over anything short of the perfect grade. This anxiety is heightened as we become more aware of the brutality common in our news. The violence has become too common, too mundane. And with gun deaths seemingly spiraling more out of control every year, that just adds another potent element into the cocktail of fear. Yet my early suspicion still didn’t mask the dread when those rumors were confirmed. Today’s news is a nightmare come to life.*

This fall I’ll begin a job as assistant professor at a Texas institution that, thanks to a recent legislative bill, will allow concealed carry. I’d be lying if I said I won’t experience a millisecond of dread any time someone walks toward me after a lecture with a serious look in their eye, or when anyone walks briskly into my office with determined pace. I wish those fears were irrational, but they’re not. The UCLA professor today was just the second academic to be shot in his office this year. Just knowing that anyone could be walking around campus carrying a concealed weapon will further add to this stress, not decrease it.

[As a side note: it is ironic that most of the people pushing for these concealed carry bills hold a superficial appeal to an originalist reading of the Second Amendment. However, the very author of that amendment, James Madison, approved the disavowal of guns on the University of Virginia campus, something that the governor of Georgia noted in his repeal of a concealed campus law.]

I feel bad for those who have bought into the myth that the only thing to stop a “bad guy” with a gun is a “good guy” with a gun. What a fraudulent and naive way to think the world operates. Not only is it ignorant of nearly all the data and studies that prove the obvious premise that “more guns” equals “more violence,” but it is steeped in a juvenile and jejune mindset more appropriate for an adolescent who plays with GI-Joes than an adult who makes grownup decisions. It seems some think the only equilibrium of safety is found in a Mexican standoff. If the UCLA professor had a gun, that likely would have led to the student shooting more quickly and erratically, perhaps even leading to more deaths. And as for bystanders: wanna-be heroes often kill as many innocents as duplicitous villains. This isn’t hollywood.

More, the “good guy with a gun” myth originated with and is pedaled by the money-grabbing gun industry who tries to make a buck through our bloodshed. Those who buy into it are either ignorant of the facts or are just flat-out obtuse as to how the world works.

But what I’m really worried about is how these bills that allow concealed carry on campuses–and in most public locations, for that matter–is that they just normalizes the very presence of guns and silently vindicate their depraved purpose. These shootings are not normal. Our illogical and indefensible obsession with gun rights is not normal. As the best analysis of our gun culture—The Onion—puts it, we pretend that this is a necessary sacrifice for our liberty when it reality it is a perversion of our society. We pretend that these acts are inexplainable only because we reject the obvious explanation. With every action taken to broaden concealed carry on our public campuses—and, further, with every time we refuse to pass common sense gun regulation—we move further down the road toward embracing the absurd and rationalizing the irrational.

Students who are upset with their professors will be more prone to take drastic measures, as the gap between violent anger and murderous rage decreases to eventual nonexistence. Pulling the trigger on a gun will not seem as drastic a move as it once did–that is the purpose of those tools, after all, and their function must be commonly accepted given society’s embrace of its mechanism. The great intellectual feat of America’s gun industry is not only its ability to convince us that the only thing that can assure safety is to multiply the engine of non-safety, but also in assuring us that such an absurd logic is in fact sane at all. It normalizes the extraordinary.

And that’s the future that faculty and students now have to face: the terror of the mundane.

_________________________
*Edit to add that it has come out that the shooter was a PhD student. The dynamic is a tad different than if it were an undergrad, but the underlying anxiety is the same.

I share this essay by esteemed scholar David Blight every year on Memorial Day because it is so important. Go read it. Here is a taste:

The war was over, and Memorial Day had been founded by African-Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration. The war, they had boldly announced, had been about the triumph of their emancipation over a slaveholders’ republic. They were themselves the true patriots. 

Despite the size and some newspaper coverage of the event, its memory was suppressed by white Charlestonians in favor of their own version of the day. From 1876 on, after white Democrats took back control of South Carolina politics and the Lost Cause defined public memory and race relations, the day’s racecourse origin vanished.

The essay is based on Blight’s award-winning book on the same topic, which is a must-read for anyone interested in the Civil War, race relations, and the horrid undercurrent that has led America to nominate a racist bigot as a presidential candidate. I heartily recommend that book, too, which only continues to seem relevant.