Transcripts For CSPAN3 Religious Influence On U.S. Politics 20240712

Our group and then we will get started. 22 ago, there is a switch. Thank you. There is a switch on the mics. In a journal of American History article, john butler challenged historians of modern america to Pay Attention to religion. In particular, he noted religions continuing importance in 20th century american politics deserves sustained attention and analysis. Scholarship in american religious history has proliferated over the past 15 years. In political history, religion has retained a jackinthebox quality, colorful, surprising, anomalous, idiosyncratic, but left on the periphery to pop up occasionally rather than systematically. Today, our roundtable will inress how religion matters american political history and we will do so in three ways. First, i blast each of our panelists to focus on a way in which religion matters, in their own research, how religion plays that they arees working on, but also how centering religion gives us a different narrative, different story than if it were on the periphery or ignored. Second, we will talk about butlers provocation, why have political historians remained reluctant bystanders about religion in American History and why does religion still get left out of calls for papers, courses, or, as someone joked today, a few of you stall awards, but not as many people come to something when religion is essentially part of it. Finally, we will discuss the ways in which religion is everywhere in our current moment, islamophobia in the religious left, evangelical right, the moral monday movement are some of the things we see regularly to lay test today. We see how religious freedom has become the catchword of the Current Administration as well as opponents to it. How should be explained this as political historians and how might political and religious historians Work Together to historisize the present moment . With me are the associate professor of religion and politics at the Danforth Center on religion and politics at Washington University in st. Louis, his awardwinning first book was preaching on wax, the photograph, and the making of modern africanAmerican Religion, and he is working on a book about religion, the fbi, and the National Security state, which is under contract with Princeton University press to his right is the assistant professor of history at Trinity University in san antonio, she is completing a book to bring the good news to all nations, religion, human rights, and u. S. Foreign policy, which will be out by cornell soonish close enough. The farright is a visiting assistant professor of history actually in the Religion Department at emory university, she is working on a manuscript, cooperative battlegrounds, religion and the search for economic alternatives, which is under contract with columbia. And i am an assistant professor of history at the university of california berkeley, my first book, and listing, how the military chaplains shaped religion and state in modern america, came out last year and im working on a project on religion in American Health care. I will turn to our first question and ask each of our scholars to talk about the bowl of religion in their own work and the way in which thinking about religion has changed the way we can understand these aspects certain aspects of American History. Thank you for that. Her own left out of introduction is that her book is also an awardwinning book, a prize for the first best first book in american religious history. Thanks for bringing us all together. My Current Research project examines the fbi and its relationship to religion during the directorship of j edgar 1972. From 1924 to the focus on religion illuminates understudied yet vital aspects of the internal culture and practices and how that he does the Public Perceptions of the fbis political work and the fbis of theanding relationship between religion and National Security. Existing studies of the fbi as dismissed the role of religion in the making and shaping of the bureau, the rule of religion has been more prominent in political histories of postwar america, displaying how the cold war shaped americas religious landscape. Yet these studies of religion and the cold war tended to downplay the bowl of the top domestic Security Force and the cold war watchdog, the fbi. Too often in these studies, hoover is looking literally and figuratively on the margins. In my research, i focus on the and between religion hoovers fbi. There are three things i will discuss today that this connection reveals about american politics and american political history. First, J Edgar Hoover himself. Examining double of fate and the life of J Edgar Hoover reveals that he became a central figure in american civil religion, americas political faith expressed in the set of beliefs and Sacred Symbols and rituals in the public sphere. Without looking at religion in the life of J Edgar Hoover will miss a number of things. In his childhood diaries, they show, as well as his experience as a teenage son is cool tina teacher, and he export a cult and ministry. This reveals how religion shaped hoovers worldview before he became the director of the fbi. His faith remained while he became the director. He was a trustee and member of the Presbyterian Church, strained up pew with president eisenhower and john Foster Douglas and remained in contact with his pastor for the remainder of his life. This reveals that hoovers understanding of religion, specifically his calvinistic understanding, not only shaped how he viewed america, but shaped how he understood and executed his job in protecting america. This is evident in his speeches, the book in which he began framing patriotic christianity as the sole antidote to communism and how he organized the bureau, which i will address. Scholars and casual observers may doubt the sincerity of hoovers faith. However, americans at his time did not doubt that faith. Every major Christian Faith community from the Catholic Church to the African Methodist Episcopal Church to evangelical and mainline churches, they all crowned hoover with awards, citations, and plaques, and even a stained glass window at a church. Hoover was deemed an ground as a champion in american politics. He can be seen as arguably the high priest of american civil religion. This title has been reserved for president s such as dwight eisenhower. However, as presence came and went, every eight every four to eight years, hoover remained. For almost half a century, he led the bureau and for countless americans, he was the person to look to for all things for god, flag, and country. On the a keen eye importance of religion reveals that the bureau had a religious culture, which shape how americans viewed and understood there fbi. The fbiovers offices, instituted private worship services, spiritual retreats, and communion and prayer breakfasts exclusively for fbi agents. Even when the fbi admitted africanamerican agents, these services and affairs were exclusively for white agents. Similar to american civil religion, bureaus religion culture borrowed from catholic forms, especially the militaristic aspect of jesuit spirituality. Hoovers men were seen as more than just federal bureaucrats but as pious disorders, drafted to embark on a crusade against all things subversive and ungodly. War,e context of the cold americans began to solve see there fbi agent as a clearinghouse of true faith and allegiance. Fbi files are filled with letters from the public requesting religious and political advice. Mr. Hoover, which church should i attend . Is billy graham a real question . Should i listen to oral roberts . Is Martin Luther king a communist . Should i attend this church that is led by a woman . Is that subversive . These sorts of letters fill fbi files. Americans may have looked to their pastors, priests, and bishops to be able to address theological disputes, but many entrusted there fbi for the matters of politics. The history of the fbi can be seen and rewritten as an adjudicator of truth, faith, and political allegiance, something which contemporaries observers of the fbi know too well. Finally, focusing on religion illuminates how the bureau was able to form partnerships with leading black and white protestant and catholic faith communities, all to influence aspects of 20thcentury politics. Hoover established personal relationships with leading clergy such as president comes pastor president comes pastor, billy graham, and reverend george dorsett, as well as the first clergy number to have his own television show, solomon michelle. The fbi worked with these men and they were all men because hoover did not recognize female clergy. They worked together to bring about a certain ideal of what the proper relationship was between religion and politics in the nation. This christian syndicate monitored intelligence for the fbi, preaching and publishing it as the gospel. They publicly and privately worked with the bureau to employ Christian Faith and racialized rhetoric to construct a shared ideal of religion and National Security specifically and policy ideas more broadly. The fbi and his question Network Works to promote such policies ranging from anticivil rights legislation, anticommunist fervor, and forbidding certain viable translations. Those who supported such causes were discredited as domestic and subversive at best or destroyed at worst. Hoover used this christian syndicate to make sure that those folks were kept outside of the realm of what was considered american. With this in mind, hoovers faith and his religious formation of the bureau and its partnerships with leading clergy , perhaps we can use this to rewrite american political history in the postwar era, placing hoover at his fbi as important actors that contributed to the rise of the modern religious right. A key ion religion does not replace narratives and studies of the fbi in american politics. Whether highlighting religion serves as a complement, it as more texture to the story and brings more historical actors to a crowded stage and provides a more vivid picture of the bureau and its role in american politics. This naming and framing of this religious picture might help us better understand todays fbi and its relationship to religion. U. S. Foreign policy on a. Ange of issues starting in the 1970s and moving through the 1990s. In the process of conducting this research, one of the things i have found is that religion is a particularly fruitful avenue for analyzing not just politics, also policymaking. I find that it helps shed light on the formation of ideology and National Values and how policymakers and domestic Interest Groups promote those values. Religious beliefs as enduring andhants elements shaped continue to shape the worldview of political leaders as well as the public. They helped steer a national discourse, and in some cases, set the parameters of what is acceptable in policymaking in terms of Foreign Policy. One of the key arguments i make in my book is that longstanding anxieties about religious repression and persecution and totalitarian regimes and the threat that persecution posed to the Global Missionary agenda of evangelical groups led to the establishment of a powerful evangelical Foreign Policy lobby in the United States, starting in the late 1970s. Owing in part to their particular theological beliefs, i found that evangelicals published religious freedom, their freedom to evangelize and the freedom of others to hear their visualization, as the most fundamental human rights. Concerns about religious persecution and other abuses against the faithful let evangelical groups to advocate for a christian Foreign Policy, one that upheld core religious values and protected american missionaries and those they evangelized. I look at a number of case studies to demonstrate this. One that is going to be very familiar for folks to say the cold war the soviet union, there are concerns about persecution against religious believers and the soviet union, like a siberian seven, famous in the 1970s and 1980s, but there are other cases as well. There is a considerable amount of activism by evangelicals, often that aligned with reagan era policies, but evangelicals also at times went against reagan era policies, with romania, for example, where the administration sought a differentiation policy, evangelicals were uncomfortable with that given the ongoing religious persecution there. Interesting activism that happened. These views, which were promoting religious freedom in the soviet union and other totalitarian states, at times that evangelicals to perceive authoritarian and other antitotalitarian regimes as friendly to their objectives. This is where things get interesting because this perception enabled evangelicals to interpret state violence and authoritarian countries as acceptable and sometimes desirable efforts to combat the spread of communism and therefore prevent religious persecution. For is where we see support genocidal dictators in places like guatemala being framed in human rights and religious freedom language, or support for constructive engagement in south africa as being an effort to prevent the spread of communism and religious persecution, to protect Christian South africa. There are interesting ways in which this leg which of human rights comes into play. Evangelical lobbyists in this time were adapting human rights language in their advocacy campaigns yet in their congressional testimony about events in the soviet bloc, central america, southern africa, middle east, and elsewhere. I using this language, what found is it was shaping how certain policymakers, particularly conservative policymakers, were interpreting state violence and oppression abroad. These evangelical activists and Interest Groups were able to exert an influence on official decisionmaking on a range of Foreign Policy issues. Everything from military aid to guatemala to trade relations with the soviet bloc and diplomatic relations with south africa, in terms of politics at home, this includes significant lobbying efforts to strike down the comprehensive antiapartheid act, they are not successful, i play a significant role in the effort to oppose it. All this to say that evangelical policy activism that really mattered, their Global Network mattered, it had a substantive effect on policymaking. Bringing religion into our study of politics and Foreign Policy really matters. It reminds us of the way the policymakers and politicians understand the world and reminds us that religion is a part of how they shaped their worldview. It is integral. Deeply held religious beliefs motivates grassroots political activism and it is not just on hot button issues like abortion, it is on Foreign Policy as well. What i found is bringing religion into the study of human rights activism, into politics, Foreign Policy, is critical. Aese groups may be offering different vision of human rights than the way we may typically think of as young offered by a likeal activist, but they, liberal activists, are counting their activism in exquisitely religious terms. There is a sense they are embracing the sense that morality or freedom of religion should be fundamental part of u. S. Foreign policy making, they should be explicit goals, and for us, one of the things that this pushes us to keep in mind is that when we think about the history of Foreign Policy, it is not just realist calculations of power, that often religion is a foundational aspect of shaping what policymakers think of as thinkingnal interest, of exporting morality or National Values as seeing the ways in which religion is tied up in those particular values. Bringing the history of religion into the study of human rights helps us think about the ways in which human rights history and political history around activism, a lot these terms are fluid and contested. Human rights as a term is contested in the 1970s. It shows us the ways in which these activists can use language of human rights and shape the parameters of debate and the parameters of politics. In the 1980s, the ways of thinking about human rights that conservative activists put forth and up shaping just end up shaping the politics of the Reagan Administration and the way human rights policies look in the 1980s. It is quite significant. Religious differences, religious conflicts, those having impact in politics. We should be keeping this in mind is where my work shows. What my work shows. Of a laborrian historian. Theough i get to use popular language, im a historian of capitalism. I write about cooperative corporations, which are usually dismissed as some variant of radical communis him, but i write about them as cooperative. Oney as cooperatives member one vote, they are organized around Service Rather than profit. The historiography on porations tends to suggest when we talk about corporations, we usually people are pointing toward the private business corporation, but corporations suggest that the corporations emerge as the dominant organizational form of economics in the u. S. And is literature largely describes rational andas National Natural bureaucratic forms that aim to maximize profits for shareholders. The problem with this is you miss a lot when he dont ask questions about how and why people deploy their financial resources. So i take seriously the idea that americans across the 20th century use criteria other than profit as motivation for their pocketbook politics and religion was one such metric used by americans to shape their choices about how and where to use their financial resources. I write about u. S. Workers in 2500ork city who built units of cooperative housing between the late 1920s and early 1950s, i write about finish and rinse finish immigrants who built agricultural cooperatives that are still alive and well, they are immensely successful. I write about catholic adherents of the social gospels, who looked with cooperative models. , a widehese groups range of americans, look to religious texts, looked to teachings and to their clergy to produce what i would call a moral political economy, in face, toallow people a use their religious traditions and apply those teachings to the complex social problems of the day. 1930s, the conference of american rabbis, council of churches, and National Catholic welfare council, altogether, embraced cooperative models with the possibility that these kinds of corporations could produce a more humane capitalism, a capitalism that was not as extractive as private business corporations. Thatalso embraced the idea you could, within capitalism, produce accumulation without concentration. In other words, they imagine that there are ways not through anticapitalist activism, but through reformist capitalist politics to produce a system that could more equitably distribute the wealth of the nation. Though the 1 has become the language, this was always language being deployed by workers and farmers across the United States in trying to highlight the ways in which capitalism was not working for before adoing so long public consensus that there were challenges with capitalism. Religion to bear as a category of analysis allows historians and religious studies allow us to complicate prevailing understandings of the rise of american capitalism. And that people of faith have always remained central to american visions of social change in that american religious traditions at various times and places have concerned themselves not only with individual salvation but with communal redemption and have attempted to do that through largescale corporate organizing. Thank you. Now it is my turn to give a little bit about my own work, which draws on many of the strands mentioned by my fellow scholars. As i mentioned earlier, my first book was about the military and im working on health care, so two institutional actors in American History. When i think about the military, i want to suggest first, when i started that project, the most common reaction i got was, i have never thought about that before. Why would religion have any role in the military . Maybe individuals are religious, but end of story. What i discovered through the chaplaincy, a massive Government Institution and enterprise dedicated to not just thinking about the religious lives of soldiers and officers and war, but also an institution that shaped religion itself. The carrots and sticks are incentives and disincentives for participation in the chaplaincy that did a lot to challenge some religious groups and also facilitate access to power for others. To take one example, if we look at someone like dwight eisenhower, i think you understand this entry American Religion requires understanding eisenhowers role in the military because what he brought to bear when he got to office, when he became a member of the Presbyterian Church in d. C. And was part of that political scene, where certain understandings of military religious pluralism in which many or a number of religions could coincide and live together with one another and a basic acceptance of god and morality was enough, did not have to dwell in the theological details. In many ways, that was a vision that a lot of americans coming out of world war ii shared, but it was also a vision that could be coopted by others who sought to use religion for other purposes, or secretary and or divisive ones. Eisenhower understood a perceived understanding, it was not shared, but used by others for different ends. If we look at that moment, it is also the moment when more religiousve sectarian groups wanted to enter the military and made a distinct decision to create their own seminaries so they would be able educatione militarys requirements, then enter the military, and be in a shape a space to shape policy. Both the ways in which religion was in the infrastructure of the military could shape the military itself and people within that space could make religious arguments and make what might appear as not religious argument to shape that space but also that the government itself had a role in either holding two lines in which pluralism was a value or at other times, letting go of that in 11 groves that did not share those pluralist values to participate in this space instructor reshape it and i think to understand the dynamic of american religious politics in the 20th century, we have to think about that conservativeliberal backandforth and where they had opportunities to be engaged with one another in the military was one such space. Then i will just add that if we are thinking about government and governance, i am working on a different project on hospitals and health care and i have come to believe that you cannot understand the shape of the American Health care system without understanding the role of religious hospitals and religious groups in it. By that, i do not simply mean the current debate about abortion or contraception or endoflife care, the flashy moments that clearly involve theological disagreements. I was in the archives this week looking at a number of papers about hospitals in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and one thing that was really clear and made me rethink was our Narrative Around Health insurance and the prospects and absolute erasure of the possibility of a national Health Insurance program. In part because i think the traditional narrative associates that as an impossible resolution due to pressures from groups like the American Medical Association encrypt that one too tight insurance to employment. Beyond that narrative, religious hospitals would on one hand publicly say that it is absolutely vital to provide health care to poor people, that this is necessary and tied to our religious beliefs, and at the same time, because they felt that i government Health Care System would completely destroy their own hospital system, did not want any part of a government Health Care System. This is an area in which it does not necessarily seem to be about religion or theology, but hospitals are businesses and corporations and groups that were heavily invested in the Health Care Industry were making calculated Business Decisions that in some ways contradicted their own social justice or other theological orientations around health care and healing. It is this contradictory nature of religion in these institutional spaces that i think deserves far more sustained attention, not just by me, but by others, because it is so complex, because there is not a single party line about what religion is in the space and also religious groups themselves, there is a wonderful backandforth in the early 1970s between what was the National Conference of catholic bishops and theologians disputing exactly what should or should not be acceptable in Catholic Health care and what it meant if catholic hospitals were serving a pluralistic population, including patients and Health Care Providers working who were not catholic. The theologians were far more interested in pluralism than the bishops. That, perhaps, is not surprising. But the fact that they were willing to call some of the positions of the hierarchy a disaster, i do think it is worth attention. Thinking also than about these intrareligious debates and religioussecular debates that emerged in these formative institutions of American Society i think is critical to understanding american politics in the 20th century. With that i will turn to the , next question i asked everyone to think about, which is, we have made claims for the ways in which religion tells us something about american politics and history in the 20th century that is not necessarily evident or clear if we do not pay specific attention to religion itself. So why then is this still a struggle to get religion into spaces, into courses, into syntheses . I regularly see fascinating calls that list a very long list of subfields in history and religion is still not mentioned. Even with religion clearly around us. So just to reflect and think about why this is and how we might rethink how this works. Anyone can i will offer up two responses to that question. They are simple and short. But i hope that they are generative for our discussion. The first reason i will offer, perhaps it is an issue of definition. Perhaps the reason why political historians fail to engage religion is that we struggle to understand exactly what is religion. Where does one look for religion in sources . Is religion static . Does it change over time . Is it Church Attendance . Is it private devotional life . Is it Consumption Habits . Is it our relationship to capitalism . Is it philanthropic . What exactly is religion . This is a debate so much so that those of us on this panel and elsewhere in the field are still debating exactly what religion is and the debate ranges from people who see it everywhere to folks who say that it does not exist at all. Perhaps settling on a definition on religion that does not focus on the supernatural but actually focuses more on how individuals thathe world or maybe religion can be seen as a system of symbols by which people locate themselves and others in the world with reference to ordinary powers, meanings and , values. Perhaps that type of definition can help us. Since religion is usually not clearly understood in this way, it is usually treated as a jackinthebox, a secondary experience or spectacle that is caused by and accompanies a physical phenomenon but has no causal relationship to it whatsoever. Religion, as john butler once said in his articles, pops up colorfully on occasion, appearing as a momentary idiosyncratic thrusting up of , impulses from a distant, american past. But perhaps armed with the more robust definition of religion, ideais not put forth and of a mystified power in values if we have a definition that , deals with the everyday and everyday life, perhaps we can listen anew to our historical actors. We can move away from foregone conclusions about religion and the lives of our historical actors and really get down to the nittygritty to what they believed. How eisenhower understood the goal of religion in joining a church, how hoover understood it. Perhaps this can help us avoid our own understandings of religion or reading into our actors and our own biases. Finally perhaps another thing , that hinders the study of religion and political history, the idea that it is exclusively confessional. The idea that the popular notion among scholars and the broader public, that those who study religion are not only those themselves religious and pious religion tong promote and defend the faith. Few understand that religion, like race, gender, sexuality, etc. , can be approached as a subject of historical inquiry. I must confess i often avoid , discussing my research when i am on planes, trains, and automobiles and in casual venues. People see me reading a text and if it has anything to do with religion, they ask me any type of theological question that has plagued them since their childhood. Is heaven and hell real . Will i go there . Even sometimes more mundane questions, did adam named the dinosaurs . These are questions that i am not making up. They actually happened to me. This is often far from the truth about what religious scholars actually do, especially my colleagues on the stage or on the podium. The platform. People actually do study these questions in theological training but that is not the , exclusive fear of religious inquiry. Especially when we are talking about political history. Oftentimes, folks who study religion are not even religious themselves. This is not to call myself and my colleagues heathens. But it is to call our attention to the fact that such notions can hinder us from engaging a critical aspect of the American Experience and history. More historians, heathen or otherwise, studying religion that can help to dispel the myth that the study of religion is if exclusively done on confessional terms. Even admit that religion can be colorful and surprising at times , but it should not be left on the periphery. It should not be left to pop out of a confessional box occasionally, usually surrounding a president ial election. No, we should engage religion and our political histories as a common yet intense figuring vital force in american politics, one that is worthy not of uncritical warship and i triumph and narrative, nor one that is relegated to a periodic disdain and neglect, but a rigorous and consistent interrogation in our political narrative. Instead of a jackinthebox, perhaps we could let religion enjoy what don butler called what john butler called an extended performance. Not as a standalone performer on the historical stage but alongside other aspects of the american experiment in democracy. I am going to start framing myself as a heathen historian. [laughter] echo somely, i would of what was said, i think there is an assumption that historians who work on religion are religious. That is definitely not necessarily the case. Folks are coming from an external perspective have a lot to offer religious studies. One of the challenges that i think historians face when they seek to examine religion, it is challenging to demonstrate how a worldview leads to a specific policy. It is not always possible to show the exact mechanism by which that happens. Which means you have to be a creative and reading sources and thinking about the ways and influence work in making policy. It may be a methodological challenge. How do you prove that it was faith and not an appraisal of power or National Security that was the driving force in shaping a particular decision . It may not always be possible to do that, but it adds a lot when we consider the ways religion has influenced policies. Perhaps not the only factor, but an important factor. Since it is hard one might not , always want to go in the direction when you get a lot of pushback. I have a few thoughts. One is related to the academy. As a person who thinks about capitalism a lot, there has been this resurgence, new history of capitalism. It was not that historians were not previously doing great history on the economy. They used different language. In reframing how history departments operated, by the 1970s and 1980s, economics departments claimed economic history away from history departments. I see something similar with respect to religion. These history departments have jettisoned any sort of specialty in religion to religious studies departments. Which is fine, to some extent, but if we want historians to do religion, we have to hire them to do it in history departments. A radical idea, i know. It is in fact about where you are structurally located in the university. I am a historian based in Religion Department at an institute for jewish studies and i love when people ask what i do. I say, i am a political historian. Just to let them think, how do these things connect . It always confuses them. I get a good chuckle. The second thing that shapes this, historians who ignore religion i get into trouble but i will say it anyway will herberg seems to have a real outside influence and it is the kind of weird thing where everybody sort of assumes that he is right and always seems to me that the underlying thought process, he got it. He got it right, so what is there left to say . This is, i think, wrong in a lot of ways. Also, is important to place him in his political context, in a world of consensus history. He was proscriptive, not descriptive. I would argue about the way, by the time he writes in 1955, the structure itself is almost collapsed. It is almost a decade later that Time Magazine can ask on its cover, is god dead . Which i think in some ways points to how problematic it is that we accept the idea of a judeochristian tradition. It is popular these days to invoke that. As a historian i am not even , sure what that means. I think that also, by the 1950s, there are a range of other faith traditions that are banging at the door of the state , in particular for resources , and acknowledgment. Buddhists, hindus, atheists, and evangelicals are critiquing that structure. What but even so, historians, particularly those who do not do religion, when they try to do religion, they reference herberg and move on. I think that might be part of what it is historians are ignoring it. The last thing i would say, it seems connected to teaching. It is really hard to teach religion. Insofar as, a student of mine comes in and they Say Something that i would consider to be in the vein of white supremacy, i know how to combat that. I know how to respond to that. But faith claims are really different. Insofar as, you neither have to believe or agree with them but you do have to respect them. My first time teaching in a Religion Department was at emory and i had only taught history classes and no student had ever claimed their religion to me before asking a question. In my classroom now, at least half of my students begin by saying i am or i am not x. It is intermittent and it requires it is intimate and it requires we are not trained to have in graduate school and many of us have cobbled together skills to be able to teach religion. I think it is hard to teach religion and that is a real barrier. I think the kind of question about finesse and how we work with students or sources and one of the things ive been thinking a lot about, it is trite to say that religion is complicated. Of course, so are race, gender, sexuality, capitalism, other categories with which we regularly engage. If you do legal history, you learn law. If you do medical history, you learn about medicine. If you do business history, you learn about business methods. Part of what it means to do religion well is to become fluent in a number of different religious languages to be able to discern the difference between what certain words mean and different faith traditions and what they are signaling, to be able to think about what it is that those words are signaling to a Faith Community and what, at the same time, they may be registering quite differently with other faith communities and with other communities in general. I think that is a real challenge. Figuring out the religious literacy necessary to unpack and work with terminology that often is not necessarily intentionally coded, but speaking at many different registers at once and understood in many different registers at once and i think that is a challenge that religion presents, that i think methodologically, we do a lot of work in history, of course, trying to think through sources in deep and sophisticated ways and religion often challenges what that looks like in ways that maybe other categories also challenge us, but not in the same way, not with the need to learn another language in the same way. I think, similarly, the challenge that religion presents, which is a wonderful challenge but still can be difficult, is that religious groups do not necessarily adhere to conventional political alignment. How do we look at the africanamerican church that is very much on the Progressive Left when it comes to racial justice, but maybe is not necessarily when we are grappling with gender. Women in the nation of islam it is a really challenging to think about how a space is a space of liberation is also a space of these are both operating at the same time. I was reading recently the pamphlets this extraordinarily right wing Catholic League for civil and religious rights. So to the right that the bishops did not like it. Amidst the need to support vouchers and parental rights and education in an overwhelmingly antiabortion, anticontraceptive stance, in 1979, an article arguing against any effort to stop the flow of immigrants. This does not fit necessarily how we understand politics of either the present or past and that gives us a lot to work with it if we are willing to work with it. It can be set aside because it does challenge some conventional narrative. It brings us to the present moment, in many ways politically, religion is always around us. It is invoked constantly paired it is generating a lot of policies of the trump administration. Whether it is with the muslim ban or the set up of the office of the division of religious freedom and the office of civil rights within health and human services, we see religion playing clear roles in the administration. We also see 22 Democratic Candidates talking about religion. We see reverend William Barber organizing the moral monday movement. We look at the sanctuary movement, it is led by religious leadership. The question is to think about, how do we work with this and how do we explain this politically and religiously . What does this do to our notions of narratives of history in the 21st century and to think about historical antecedents or how do we get here . What is changed . What is different . One thing i would say, thinking of the long trajectory of history, we look back and there are moments in time when religion is salient, influential in politics and Foreign Policy and it ebbs and flows. There is more salience in religion when i think of the gilded age and progressive era, religion has more salience in politics. When there are these moments, it seems religion and religious actors, either because there is a built in locus for organizing or because the nature of the theoretical arguments can be applied. Religion can be a way to understand the problem and to propose what seemed to be god ordained answers. It can also be a way to argue for keeping things as they are, right . Barbara behrens, who made arguments for the reason things were the way they were, you can make these arguments on both sides. It is not just the left or the right. Religion is inherently malleable. Who is the outside arbiter to tell you that you are right or wrong . This question of the language of religious freedom in our current political debate, how do we see religious conservatives and religious liberals making arguments about religious freedom . Being forced to provide services equally to everyone is seen as an infringement of religious freedom. If you look abroad at people being attacked for their religion, that is an infringement of religious freedom. The language is powerful. Because these terms are so malleable, it is a challenge but it also means that we will keep saying this. It is not going away. Me . I am not sure i have a great answer. In some ways, my inclination is always to ask about money. I think perhaps one of the things that can help explain our political moment is how deeply seemingly disinterested academics are in american religious beliefs. Those people are not ambivalent in those beliefs. They give money. They tie their labor to their religious commitments and they build institutions. Part of the reason religion is so powerful today, they have a lot of capital. They have other kinds of capital but they have a lot of money. They use that money and those resources in pursuit of their political worldviews. Without paying attention to religion, we are getting a thin understanding of americans and their political commitments and where they come from. One thing that raises for me, thinking of institutions and tv, radio, and other media, universities and colleges, the other question is thinking forward. What is the rise of those who dont like a religion, how will they interact . It raises these questions religion, it is a protected constitutional category. Belief is the most protected category legally in the United States. You can believe whatever you want. The expression of it, the action on it is where the challenges are. That gives rise to a lot of people, if my belief is protected, i should be able to do whatever i want. As we have seen, politically with immigration, migration, what happens on the border, who gets labeled a terrorist in this country, these are questions that tie into american understandings of religion, which i think has been as much shaped by government as by religious groups themselves. We want to leave time for questions from the audience, challenges or things you think are interesting to discuss, debate or otherwise. If you could just say who you are. My name is paul and i teach at stetson university, a liberal arts college in florida. I am interested in all the presenters here. My question is about the attention to religion beyond confessional terms. It is tacit throughout much of the panel here. That suggests a way of thinking about religion beyond church and theology toward lived experience. I wonder about your thoughts on whether through methodology, a tacit acceptance of this broader range of religiosity, and for extra credit, if anyone is interested in commenting on how that might make some conservatives rather upset . Let me maybe give an example. One of the things i have been thinking about lately is jesuit spirituality. The jesuits are all about what they see as cooperating with god in the world to help bring humanity back to god. That, to me, is a very lived experience. This is the idea that everything we do is related somehow to worship of god. It is not necessarily about going to church, not about how much you pray, but it is about the actions that you do in the world. This is why, in my own research, i find that j. Edgar hoover and j. Edgar hoover finds it helpful for his fbi agents, because their action in the world can be framed in such a way that they are cooperating with divine to bring america back to god or keep america on track. I am very comfortable with that, because it helps me as a historian to track these ideas in these actions that are stemming from certain religious categories and ideals that have reference to transcendent ideas, but are really lived out in the world. I am comfortable with that, and i think that those of us who are living in the world today and watching the news understand that even the religious right has this idea that everything they are doing in their political activism is somehow for them rooted in a certain kind of religious commitment to god in that regard. I will leave the extra credit to other folks. I sometimes tell my students that we study not earthly matters, but matters of the earth, to emphasize the extent to which questions of faith are always connected to questions of politics. In fact, i think they are inseparable, and, i am not sure everyone agrees with that, but i really enjoyed this panel and i have been grappling a lot in my own effort to achieve religious literacy and fluency in thinking about what to do with institutions and churches that are funding projects, or thinking a lot about the language of religion being as important as the language of music. I wonder if one of the dilemmas of religion as a language is there seems to be some sort of methodological peace that throws it down there, that category of analysis did some work, if there is a moment where you need that piece to really hold onto historians who would benefit from having religion and other fluency is that they have. That is a general question for the panel to respond to. Very specifically, i will reduce this to one, i want to get professor martin to respond to the news cycle around the documents being scrawled around Martin Luther king. For those less familiar, a historian felt it was his duty to release some salacious scuttlebutt that had to do with speculations from an unnamed author in the fbi who thought dr. King had been party to or a member of a crime of sexual violence. It is an extraordinary revision of the fbi to think of it as a religious institution and think of it as the moral fbi. I have records of my great grandfather who was a reverent, who had this marginalia. I am grappling with this in my own writing and thinking about the news cycle and where you come down on what we may credibly infer on a moral fbi, about what the character of the organization might be and what it tells us about the nature of state surveillance and what to do with these kinds of claims, when we have a bundle of documentation that is talking about the Spiritual Life and morality on one hand, but we also know the fbi is trying to clearly engage in preemptive strikes against black radicals and the likes. We are we supposed to balance your findings with what these historians are comfortable speculating . I guess we will go backwards. Thank you for raising that. I appreciate the comments that i read that you made about this as well. I have to say that i was disappointed in the way that the historian, who i count as a colleague, i was disappointed in the way he framed his findings. If you dont know his wonderful work on the fbi and Martin Luther king, we know that the fbi was out to get Martin Luther king. There is no doubt about it. I am presented that he presented the search while leaving most of that context out. For folks who havent read his books, they dont know that the fbi makes a claim in 1963 to j. Edgar hoover in a 70page report saying martin king is not a communist. The communists dont have any influence on the Civil Rights Movement. Hoover was upset. He writes back that this is absurd and after martin kings march on washington, they push for further analysis. They told mr. Hoover, you are right. We cannot count on this is key, and i wish he would have cited this we can no longer count on evidence that would stand up in a court of law or congressional committees in order to discredit Martin Luther king. We have to go beyond that sort of evidence. He doesnt mention that and i think it is important that the fbi is aiming to find anything they can to discredit him, including as i mentioned in my own work, funneling and having ministers launder information about Martin Luther king that he is a communist when they said they have no evidence. One of the things i think he could have done in the article is mention the broader background that the fbi has decided that they will not depend on evidence that will stand up in a court of law or before a congressional committee. The second thing i wish he would have done is put the fbi surveillance of martin king in a broader history of surveillance of black sexuality and black bodies. We know that in lots of records, the way that africanamericans bodies, especially talking about sexuality, is always characterized as unnatural or something that is abnormal. For the fbi to make these claims, they are in a long tradition of doing that in america. Finally, the framing of the article was made in a kind of me too format, the idea that martin king had sat back and given advice while a woman was sexually assaulted. It was framed in a way to be culpable for the me too moment, but that has taught us that we need to listen to the voices of women around these issues, especially around people in power. Men in power. We dont have these womens voices in this article. We have the fbi and marginalia written by an unnamed person on a transcript of an audio recording. That is a lot of steps. An audio recording that we will not have access to until 2027. It was framed in a way that the evidence is available to us right now. I think if he had done some of those things, he could have engaged the claims, but instead, it was presented in a way that i think was unfair to the historical evidence. In 2027, perhaps we will have the tapes and be able to judge for ourselves. It may be a sexual encounter, but the way it was described by fbi agents has to be understood in light of the longer campaign against king, as not concerned about evidence. If that was the case, if the fbi had had martin king on tape, evidence that he was sitting back watching a Sexual Assault occur, why not turn that over to the local authorities in d. C. , and you have martin king, supposedly with evidence, being part of a crime that was committed. I question if that was the case why the fbi did not use that material to do the very thing they wanted to do. I think if it was framed in a way that was more truthful to the evidence with more context, with a broader historical narrative about the fbi, africanamerican activists, i think the article could have engaged in a way, but instead, it was presented in a way that i would argue was salacious and not always true to Historical Records within the context of historical record. The wonderful question about an article being dropped, i will just say, yes. [laughter] isnt one of the reasons in secular academia why religion and politics is not discussed, a number of historians and other scholars are intrinsically hostile to any form of religious expression, and is it also possible that discussing religion and politics in other sectors of life is a misplaced fear that engaging in such discussions would involve establishing religion or promoting any form of religious expression or preference . I think it is certainly a longstanding convention that the explanation for historians not engaging deeply with religion is that they are not religious or extremely hostile to religion, but that doesnt explain why religion has retained importance in early American History. You dont do early American History without paying attention to religion, so i dont think early american nests are somehow more religious than modern americanists are somehow more religious than modern americanists. I dont think religion is always the central category, but it is usually present in most sociological studies that it hasnt been in histories. I dont think as a group i wouldnt put money on sociologists being more friendly to religion than historians either. I think there is probably some disinterest or disinclination, because it doesnt seem personally powerful perhaps, or because it seems less critical to certain ways of understanding the past than other categories do, but i think that is why at least some of the explain nations you have offered today help get out some of the other structural difficulties, because i think mere indifference if it were mere indifference, then there are lots of other not everyone comes to graduate training in history with an intrinsic interest in race, gender, class, sexuality, and yet, you could not get away with not engaging in those categories, i dont think. The question to me remains, why this one, and i think, some disinterest may explain part of it, but i think there are other dimensions. That sort of captures it. Im just not sure why it is not inherently interesting. I am not religious and i find it fascinating the way peoples worldviews and beliefs shaped their engagement in the wider world. It is so significant in the past for so many different groups. It seems surprising to me that we dont talk about it more in the 20th century. And it is still significant today. I will just add, in teaching, i taught American History american religious histories this semester and a number of students said this explains things that i recognized but didnt understand. I teach in california, they are like, this is not the narrative of cesar chavez you dont get. There are a lot of things you dont get about cesar chavez in Public Schools in california, but paying attention to his catholicism does explain certain aspects of his organizing farmworkers and the ways in which why when he sets up health care clinics, they dont provide contraception. There are a lot of registers that are important, or california has finally done away with the build a Mission Project in fourth grade, which is incredibly problematic for imperialistic regions, but also the implicit understanding of the role of missions in california, but students would say to me, even just understanding the geography of california and the politics of california, it is important to understand the legacy of Spanish Colonial missions. Students are really thankful for this, so one of the things i would urge is, this is an opportunity that students, in my experience, are really attracted to. I say this also is the first person to teach American Religion at berkeley since 1980. I would only add to that, thinking about the classroom, i think this is where professor connollys point is so important. I find students in the classroom struggle in the same way that they struggle to talk about race in sophisticated, informed ways, i think our students also struggle with talking about religion in sophisticated and informed ways, especially in the midst of this country, wherever students, if they are inundated with religion, it is mostly the groups that are the loudest and that is mostly the religious right. When students hear religion, they think religious right, and when you introduce them to someone like martin king and they are saying, this is not what i thought religious people did, i think we are confronted with a wonderful opportunity, but to professor connollys point, we have to be clear about giving them a language and discourse how to talk about these ideas in the classroom. I dont know if this is true, but my sense is that a lot of students on the engagement on American College campuses is usually related to the arabisraeli conflict and about jewish groups and muslim groups disagreeing and now, nobody wants to touch that stuff with a 10 foot pole, so, i pitched a class on american zionism and all of my colleagues went they would let me teach it, but they are looking at me going, youre opening a bag of worms that you dont want. My sense is that we cannot underplay how much that conversation has hijacked any sort of serious engagement around religion for fear of inflaming tensions that already exist and that universities so poorly managed to begin with. Take religion very seriously. My question comes out of teaching as well. I will start from my own personal experience. I teach at willamett university in oregon. It is the west, they are very unchurched for the most part. They dont know the reformation. Part of me in trying to understand the reticence, students have difficulty talking about religion and i will frequently have this occasion, where a student will be talking about religion in class and afterwards will come out to me as being religious. I myself do not identify as a person of faith, but they sense that this is a safe space where they can talk about the fact that they go to church and that is ok. It is stunning to me that they feel that sense that it is not ok and i wonder how much of that has to do with this narrative of ecumenical americanism and the cold war. I think of the ways in the 1970s and 80s, there was the protestant and the catholic and the jew and we are all americans, because we are not communist. Then that goes away and there is this polarization in general in the way our identities have gotten so stacked and polarized and students, much like around race and other issues, i get the sense that students are just afraid to say the wrong thing and there is not that space to create a shared sense of openness with difference. It is ok to be of different faiths and talk about that. Im not sure how im supposed to teach religious history. How do you do that . What have you done that has enabled students to release some of that pressure and be comfortable sitting with each other in a diverse setting of people with different faiths . Ideas about that or i would be open on. How todo that. Teach my religion and politics seminar, it is sometimes the first time i history students are reading about how pluralistic American Society was from early on. Some of it is introducing them to different religions. There is so much happening. Pluralism and the way it comes out and in founding documents is so far away from the current polarization that they do feel comfortable about it in the earlier periods of American History. Then we Start Talking about the religious right. There is politically leftleaning evangelicals. Most students do not realize that. Trying to pull them out of the sense that the only religion is this religious right and it is very polarizing end they do not identify with that, many of them. Has alwayshat there been such a wide diversity of religion in america gives them a space to talk about what this means for politics and the constitution and laws they get groups have such outsize influence and what that means for us now. I think primary sources. It is so obviously, methodologically and pedagogically, having them start with a piece that is not related to them or even to me allows them the ability to Start Talking. Eventually they begin to assert their own opinions and thoughts more, but they have something to start with that is in blackandwhite, and they appreciate that. My students especially, the secular students. This person somehow does not understand. Beliefsson has a set of , but i see the world as this. Getting the students out of that and then respect it, when you add the politics to it, not only does that person have a deficit, but they are talking about something i do not like and do not agree with. Bursting that bubble i find incredibly hard. Not to go after herbert 20thut the bulk of century of american religious history is a history of contestation, and despite discussions and discursive attempts to make everything consensusy and united it, it is difficult to find forces you know, if we take out the catholic view it is difficult to find sources other than these brotherhood weeks, these organized one week a year, city or municipal wide events. Revealed a pass to them, you cannot escape it. It is painfully obvious the protestant, catholic, jewish, does not in any way get at the discontentand deep between and amongst, at the end even i mean, we talk about these early religious groups, denominations, as somehow they are unified. They are going at each other too. Understanding this kind of religious history is kind of a battleground is key to being able to combat that kind of ecumenical, civil religion. That kind of we are all in it together cold war thing. I would add to what my two colleagues just pointed out is one way i tried to point out that contestation but also, with my students, we have a religion and politics minor at Washington University. I find that increasingly students, while some of them made out the importance of religion or view it as some type of deficit, i have also found 23, students from 18 to whatever it may be, are also trying to figure out who they are. There is a way that i think studying religion for some of them is a way to help them figure out who they are, who they want to be, the type of world they want to live in. Them too is expose folks who felt compelled to, by religion, engage in progressive politics. I do that particularly in the class called religion in the Civil Rights Movement. Or expose them to people in the modern Civil Rights Movement who feel compelled. On religionr course and politics and america would extend to other people in the 20th century, the catholic worker movement, things of that nature. I found that to be very helpful for students to say there are other religious voices other than those i view as trying to be regressive in politics. I think that helps with the contestation and help students to understand that, as lawrence said, that religion can be used not used, but religion has been involved in a number of projects both progressive, liberal, conservative. One final question. Just a comment or a shout out for the whole panel. I asked the question the question was kind of binary between immanence and transcendentalism. Jerome martin, you entered in particular where there are intersections. Jesuits and evangelicals and others. That is a microcosm of how each hadour presentations complex vacations complex lesionsns, contextual contextualizations in understanding history. Thank you for joining us. [applause] you are watching American History tv, covering history cspan style with event coverage, eyewitness accounts, archival films, lectures, and visits to museums. All weekend every weekend on cspan3. This sunday on the presidency, Ronald Reagan gives his First Press Conference nine days after taking the oath of office in 1981. Heres a preview. Let me take someone. Opinion ofyour American Companies that want to resume business with iran . I hope they are going to do it by longdistance. Back to not want to go having just a different cast of characters but the same show going on. That,understand particularly in the field of energy, they want that, but we urging the people think long and hard before they travel to iran because we do not think their safety can be guaranteed their. Guaranteed there. Or watch the full conference here on American History tv. Next, omar bartz half talks about the holocaust experience in one Eastern European town. He is the author of anatomy of a genocide the life and death of a town. June, 2018 isom provided by the National World War Ii Museum in new orleans. Tonight is a special night. This is actually the 10th year the distinguished lecture series on report to. This was our first. We have had over 30 writers, scholars, thenalists who have visited museum as mason lecturers and share with us their stories and perspectives on americas role him or were to