When I was a graduate student at the University of Cambridge, I often walked past the Cambridge University Press bookstore that was directly in front of Kings College Chapel. They always had the “recent releases” on display, and I spent many hours skimming through their pages. I dreamt that one day I might add my own work to that long tradition of solid and sophisticated work. 

Well, I’m honored to share that I’m a little closer to that goal. Cambridge University Press has agreed to publish my book manuscript, “American Nationalisms: Imagining Union in an Age of Revolution.” It’s probably a clerical error. But until they come to their senses, I’m thrilled to be attached to such a prestigious publisher. 

Here is a brief summary of the project from my personal website:

This book seeks to identify the roots of America’s cultural tensions by chronicling the earliest cultivations of, as well as oppositions to, ideas of nationality during the country’s first fifty years of existence. It examines how the practice of nationalism took place in three specific contexts—Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina—between the end of the Revolution in 1783 through the Nullification crisis in 1832-33. American Nationalisms argues that conceptions of national identity varied dramatically during this period, and that assuming a unified narrative distorts a dynamic and diverse reality. And in doing so, it further demonstrates how theoretical constructions of nationalism were tethered to personal backgrounds, regional cultures, parochial concerns, and localized political systems.

Depictions of nationalism were more than just cultural rhetoric, a political by-product, or a partisan tool, though they certainly played all of those roles at various times. This manuscript argues that they also functioned as opportunities to think about community, cultural frameworks for understanding political union, and ideological instigators for policy, action, and thought. How one conceived America to be, or how one conceived America should be, led directly to political beliefs and practices. While a wide array of elements resulted in distinct American cultures moving apart from each other during the early nineteenth century, and though all these elements were interdependent and reciprocal, a crucial component was the growing chasm between how various states understood “nationalism” and “union.” In order to understand national fracturing, then, it is important to chart contestations over nationalism.

And finally, the book situates these cultural expressions within a broader and comparative Atlantic framework that includes similar debates that were taking place in Europe, especially in Brtain, France, and Germany.

Articles that draw from this project will appear in the spring issue of Early American Studies and the fall issue of Journal of the Early Rpublic. I’ll highlight those when they appear. 

I am working hard to revamp the introduction and conclusion, the only portions of the manuscript that still require substantive revision, and then it will go through the editing and production phase. If all goes to plan, it should arrive on bookshelves (including in the shop across from Kings College Chapel!) in about a year. 

The Juvenile Instructor has been running a series on Robert Orsi’s newest book, History and Presence. I was privileged to contribute the third entry. You can read it here. And below is an excerpt. 

One final thought from the chapter. Robert Orsi concludes this topic by addressing the scholarly (and modern) anxiety to find a purpose in these abundant events that match our own values. When talking with the woman who endured frequent sexual abuse as a child, he caught himself hoping she would say something to imply that religion gave her a way to feel “empowered” against such egregious evil. But that solution he desired was not hers. “One of the things I have found over the years,” he realized, “is that very rarely, if ever, do the people we scholars of religion talk with and write about need our protection, because what we are protecting them from is the judgment and condescension of critical theory. In other words we are protecting them from ourselves” (111). In our attempt to transform the religiosity of nineteenth-century Mormon women into modern-day suffragists, are we forcing them into categories they would reject? Does that matter? How can we better analyze claims of religious experience in their own terms, rather than our own

I strongly recommend the book. I’ve assigned several of his monographs in my classes before, and you can read my thoughts on why his work is relevant for Mormon history here. 

I’ve always been an apologist for Barack Obama since reading Audacity of Hope shortly after it was published in 2006. I think he’s the most careful and sophisticated interpreter of and proponent for deliberate democracy to be elected president in over a century. I was therefore really excited to receive the first substantive edition of his presidential addresses, We Are the Change We Seek: The Speeches of Barack Obama (Bloomsbury, 2017), edited by E. J. Dionne and Joy-Ann Reid. It was a rewarding experience to read through some of these classic speeches, many of which still move me today. Found within those words is the message of hope and change that first made me interested in presidential politics–not to mention awaken me from my previous political views–and it reaffirmed my proud feeling for having supported Obama for the past four years. Compared to the words and orders currently coming out of the White House, Obama’s message felt like healing balm.

But I must admit that I’ve become increasingly skeptical concerning the power of Obama’s overall narrative of hope. I’ve blogged previously about how the President embodied only one tradition within the black political legacy, and that it actually diverged in significant ways from the radical message of more prophetic voices like Martin Luther King Jr. Obama’s message of hope draws from the classically liberal philosophy of progressive change over time, the fervent belief that society is moving toward a better good, despite temporary reverses and roadblocks. No matter America’s shortcomings in the past, her ideals still hold pure today, and the goal for the reformer is to better align the America’s reality with America’s principles. On the other hand, the prophetic tradition, as exemplified by those who pushed for Civil Rights, believed that humanity tended toward sin and corruption, that society was prone for stagnation, and that change only came through radical action. Theirs was not a message of hope but of direct protest.

Besides Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose Between the World and Me is a manifesto for the #BlackLivesMatter movement, is the most persuasive voices for this prophetic voice today. His story is much more gritting, realistic, and often has little room for Obama’s optimism. Indeed, Coates’s phenomenal long-form Atlantic article last year, “My President Was Black,” argued that Obama could only be elected because he wasn’t from this more pessimistic tradition.

But another significant voice is Eddie Glaude, who teaches religion and African American studies at Princeton. It was quite a juxtaposition, then, that the same weekend I (re-)read Obama’s famous addresses I also read Glaude’s fantastic Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul (Crown, 2016). (I know, I know; I’m a year late.) In many ways, the latter is meant to be a direct indictment of the first. Glaude, while acknowledging much of what Obama accomplished and symbolized, still identified him as a “confidence man” who “sold black America the snake oil of hope and change” by saying what the nation wanted, rather than what we needed, to hear. Most of his policies, including the My Brother’s Keeper initiative, were merely “a Band-Aid for a gunshot wound.” Glaude didn’t mince words. Most chapters identified structural problems with American society, rooted them within historical and cultural contexts, and then emphasized Obama’s inability and unwillingness to actually address either.

At the center of Obama’s shortcoming, according to Glaude, is his commitment to an American ideal. A metaphor of American exceptionalism, the belief that underneath the struggles there are transcendent American values. As a firm believer in the nation’s democratic ideals, Obama, like many white liberals, casts the country’s problems as “aberrations” rather than concluding that “inequality and racial habits are part of the American Idea.” Specifically, white supremacy–which Glaude defines as “the way a society organizes itself” based on “a set of practices informed by the fundamental belief that white people are valued more than others”–has always been the governing mechanism of America’s political tradition. A failure to recognize that foundational fact renders any reform effort as inadequate. Instead of addressing entrenched racial habits embedded in society, we instead perform “racial theater” whenever a particular moment of race violence crops up, only to return to the status quo weeks later. That Obama’s tepid remarks following the episodes of Jeremiah Wright, Trayvon Martin, and Michael Brown are heralded as landmark addresses only shows the depressingly low boundary for discourse. Here’s Glaude on Obama’s speeches concerning race:

For much of his presidency, Obama constantly contorted to avoid the racial land mines of American politics. The acrobatics affirmed the troublesome idea that serious engagement with racial inequality in this country is anathema. The irony is glaring, isn’t it? The first black president can’t call attention to the racial habits that get in the way of genuine democracy, but his election can read some to believe the illusion that we are post-racial.

It is in this way that Obama’s presidency could be as much a hindrance to black equality as an accelerant. Conservatives can proclaim that we have made progress by electing an African American POTUS, yet little progress toward racial rights actually take place. In Obama’s reticence to inflict “white fear,” the inevitable backlash to steps toward racial equality, he was severely limited in what he could say and accomplish. He constantly had to reaffirm that he was “not the President of Black America”–as if there haven’t been plenty presidents of “White America”–and he often justified, rather than attacked, white rage. In his address distancing himself from Reverent Jeremiah Wright’s rhetoric, for instance, Obama equated Wright’s prophetic anger with that felt by his white grandmother who distrusted black men. As if both of those feelings were based on similar foundations. And to preserve his message of “hope,” he typically fell back on the classic narrative of self-help, community decay, and slow-form liberal progress. Glaude explains how the threat of white fear curtailed much of Obama’s words.

White fear requires that we make white people feel comfortable about race…It also entails translating the specific concerns of black communities into something more universal issue can’t be all about black people. We have to lift all boats. All of this happens because of one unmistakable fact: if we talk directly about black suffering in this country we risk alienating of large segments of white America, jump-starting their fears…Obama’s election did little, if anything, to uproot [these fears]. In fact he conceded to their terms.

Rather than assuaging fear, Glaude argues, we should instead directly confront it. Until that blockade is toppled, efforts for racial equality will be severely limited. In this context, the “No Drama Obama” mantra takes an ominous hue.

Glaude’s book is far more than a critique of Obama. Rather, it is a careful overview of what he calls the “Black Great Depression” that has plagued African American communities long after the Great Recession subsided. It also posits tools for future battles, focusing specifically on local activism. I heartily recommend it.

But I was particularly taken by yet another example of the poignant divergence within the black political tradition. (Or should I say, traditions.) And it made me reconsider my own love for Obama’s speeches. Am I attracted to them because they console the precious myth of white liberal progress? Does my own background and privilege predispose me to sympathize with a philosophy that doesn’t rock the boat? Obama’s message makes me feel good–gives me goosebumps!–but Glaude’s reminds me that I should feel uncomfortable.

As a historian, I should recognize that history’s biggest moments are rarely those that reaffirm traditional values, but rather introduce new ones.

Since this blog is a scrapbook of sorts for my writings elsewhere, I figured I should register a couple recent essays that I wrote related to the LDS Church’s relationship to the Trump administration. 

The first essay, “The Mormon Tabernacle Choir Will Usher In the Trump Era,” puts the inauguration in context of Mormonism’s peripheral position in American culture. It was published at Religion Dispatches, which has featured plenty of excellent coverage on Mormonism in the past. An excerpt:

If the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s participation in Ronald Reagan’s inauguration was the coronation of the Church’s assimilation with the religious right, its involvement with Donald Trump’s represents the extent to which it will defend that position. It embodies both Mormonism’s integration within America’s political power structure as well as its inability to conceive of a world outside of it.

The second, at Washington Post, is titled “Where is the Mormon Church on Trump? History Demands Their Leadership.” The op-ed focuses on the LDS Church’s history of being refugees and immigrants, and it urges Mormon leadership to take a stand against Trump’s executive order. A taste:

Anything short of a courageous and bold declaration in the face of religious tyranny would be a betrayal of Mormons’ pioneer and prophetic legacy. If the Mormon faith remains committed to speaking out on moral issues, a right on which they have long insisted, this is its pressing moment.

A few hours after the post appeared, the Mormon Newsroom release a brief (and underwhelming) statement. But to their credit, the Church-owned Deseret News printed a much more direct editorial the following Monday. 

Let’s hope there are more positive things to write about going forward. 

Trump’s first few days in office have been, well, newsworthy. And by that I mean he’s spent much of his time fighting with the news. The morning after his inauguration, he declared war on those who dared claim his crowd was smaller than that of Obama’s. After visual evidence clearly demonstrated the curtailed audience for his speech—a fact that, frankly, should not be surprising given the demographic and political makeup of the DC area—Trump sent his press secretary to scold the media and, while flanked with blown-up images of the crowd, declare that it was “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period.” They then followed that up by insisting that the only reason Hillary Clinton won the general vote was because of wide-spread voting fraud, an accusation based on zero evidence and fraudulent reports. Neither of these claims are within the realm of possibility, but are easily disproved with even superficial research. So why would Trump’s team start their administration with such blatant lies?

I think one answer can be found in a seemingly quixotic place: the rise of evangelical fundamentalism in the twentieth century. Bear with me.

A few years ago Harvard University Press published The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age, a fascinating book co-authored by religious historian Randall Stephens and physics scholar Karl Giberson. They argued that over the last hundred years, a particular segment within the Evangelical community, especially those with a fundamentalist bent, worked to establish competing realms of intellectual authority. When faced with new challenges from “secular” truths regarding history, biology, psychology, and other fields, charismatic leaders developed alternate realms that reaffirmed more conservative “truths.” Those who pushed things like evolution could therefore be tactically disarmed because their arguments were based on a different set of values: their ideas were not “anointed” by God, and thus dismissed.

The result of this were the rise of anti-intellectual, populist, and charismatic leaders who, though lacking in credentials and credibility, could draw an immense following. Ken Ham, an Australian young-earth creationist, built a popular creationism museum and, more recently, reconstructed Noah’s ark. David Barton, a self-trained historian who peddles easily debunked ideas about America’s “Christian founding,” became a close advisor to a number of conservative politicians. These and other individuals capitalized on this artificial bubble that shields them from actual research, peer-review, and criticism. They have made a successful career selling “alternative facts.”

So what does this have to do with Trump? I can see at least two points of connection. First, I think these models of delegitimized and delegitimizing discourse laid a foundation for Trump’s support. According to Pew, 81% of white evangelicals voted for Trump, someone who’s noted for not being very, um, religious. They were willing to buy into his narrative of a “rigged” system and “crooked” media because they’ve heard similar things in their religious setting for years. They shared a distrust for the same liberal, educated elites who challenged their intellectual value system. Their hatred for the “mainstream media” is not too distant from their rejection of “secularists.” They were willing to live within a bubble of contained, self-referential rationality.

And second, Evangelical discourse provided a blueprint for Trump’s public persona. Rather than entering into competing ideas within a marketplace of thought, fundamentalists learned to cast a particular meaning to each side of the debate: the “anointed,” chosen by God, on the one hand, and the “depraved,” those who rejected God’s truth, on the other. That makes it so an idea’s veracity or factual vindication are irrelevant. Trump’s administration, from the very beginning, is setting the foundation for the “chosen” to be those willing to accept his bold assertions, and the “corrupt” to be those who challenge him tooth and nail. By making his supporters accept things that are otherwise indefensible, his team is neutering the very possibility of debate.

Progressives are simultaneously flummoxed that Trump’s administration is willing to destroy their credibility by presenting obvious falsehoods while also wondering why many still support him. Why would so many people sign up for “alternative facts”? But historians of American religion should be able to explain the intellectual genealogy for such a dynamic, as well as explain why this politics of knowledge still plays a role today. America has long had alternative ways of knowing, and Trump is merely able to exploit them.

It turns out Trump may be more Evangelical than we thought.