American Religious Nationalism Research Articles

Fitting Comfortably: Mormonism and the Narrative of National Violence

Fitting Comfortably: Mormonism and the Narrative of National Violence

Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution. By Joseph S.Moore. Pp. xiv, 214. Oxford University Press, 2016, £22.99, $31.95.The Origins of American Religious Nationalism. By SamHaselby. Pp. x, 336. Oxford University Press, 2015, £59.00, $78.00.

The Heythrop JournalVolume 62, Issue 1 p. 136-137 Book Review Founding Sins: How a Group of Antislavery Radicals Fought to Put Christ into the Constitution. By Joseph S. Moore. Pp. xiv, 214. Oxford University Press, 2016, £22.99, $31.95. The Origins of American Religious Nationalism. By Sam Haselby. Pp. x, 336. Oxford University Press, 2015, £59.00, $78.00. Terrance Klein, Terrance Klein Ellenwood, KansasSearch for more papers by this author Terrance Klein, Terrance Klein Ellenwood, KansasSearch for more papers by this author First published: 26 December 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/heyj.13702Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume62, Issue1January 2021Pages 136-137 RelatedInformation

Why evangelicals voted for Trump: A critical cultural sociology

Most white evangelicals viewed Donald Trump as the lesser of two evils. They were driven by concerns about abortion, religious freedom, and the Supreme Court. But a plurality preferred him to other GOP candidates. Why? Because they are white Christian nationalists. As such, they were attracted by Trump’s racialized, apocalyptic, and blood-drenched rhetoric. It recalled an earlier version of American religious nationalism, one that antedated the softened tones of modern-day “American exceptionalism” first introduced by Ronald Reagan. At the same time, Trumpism was stripped of the explicit allusions to Christian scripture that traditionally tethered American religious nationalism to Christian political theology. One way of reading Trumpism, then, is as a reactionary and secularized version of white Christian nationalism. I conclude by arguing that the proper response to Trumpism is not to double down on radical secularism but to recover America’s civil religious tradition.

Religions Series: “Christian Nationalism in the United States”—Ebook Introduction

first_page settings Order Article Reprints Font Type: Arial Georgia Verdana Font Size: Aa Aa Aa Line Spacing:    Column Width:    Background: Open AccessEditorial Religions Series: “Christian Nationalism in the United States”—Ebook Introduction by Mark Edwards Department of History, Political Economy, Geography, and Social Studies, Spring Arbor University, 106 E Main St, Spring Arbor, MI 49283, USA Religions 2017, 8(5), 93; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel8050093 Received: 9 May 2017 / Revised: 10 May 2017 / Accepted: 10 May 2017 / Published: 13 May 2017 (This article belongs to the Special Issue Christian Nationalism in the United States) Download Download PDF Download PDF with Cover Download XML Download Epub Versions Notes While Christianity in American history remains a vibrant subfield, the subject of Christian nationalism in the United States remains understudied. The best survey on the topic, Robert T. Handy’s A Christian America: Protestant Hopes and Historical Realities, was lasted updated in 1984. The long absence of studies is particularly striking, given that related abstractions such as “civil religion” and “culture wars” receive regular updates. Recently, a number of historians have returned directly and indirectly to the subject of Christian nationalism, including John Fea (Fea 2016), Steven Green (Green 2015), Amanda Porterfield (Porterfield 2015), David Sehat (Sehat 2011), Emily Conroy-Krutz, (Conroy-Krutz 2015), Matthew Sutton (Sutton 2004), Kevin Kruse (Kruse 2015), Michael Thompson (Thompson 2015), and Sam Haselby (Haselby 2015), among others. Their scholarship teaches us several lessons. First, we should avoid “decline and revival” narratives and understand Christian nationalism as a construction (a “myth,” as Green terms it) that has arisen at various times in various places to accomplish a myriad of work. Second, Christian nationalism has been advanced by a diversity of persons and groups favorable and hostile to the idea, not just by evangelical Protestants. Third, Christian nationalism can be operational even when its keywords “Christian nation” and “Christian America” are absent. Finally, and most importantly, “Christian nationalism” is a discursive site where politics and history meet—where assertions of identity and power are conjoined.The essays in this Special Issue will assess and apply (or relate) those lessons to a number of new subjects, events, and time periods within American history. Our intent is not to document every instance of Christian nationalism from every possible perspective. Rather, our aim is to prove the utility of “Christian nationalism” as an analytical concept—like “civil religion” or “culture wars”—to understand continuity and disjuncture throughout U.S. politics, culture, and society. Our respective definitions, redefinitions, and reframing of Christian nationalism should spark further investigations into its multiple manifestations and impact. Conflicts of InterestThe authors declare no conflict of interest.ReferencesFea, John. 2016. Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? Revised Edition: A Historical Introduction. Louisville: Westminster John Knox. [Google Scholar]Green, Steven. 2015. Inventing a Christian America: The Myth of the Religious Founding. New York: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]Porterfield, Amanda. 2015. Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar]Sehat, David. 2011. The Myth of American Religious Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]Conroy-Krutz, Emily. 2015. Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. [Google Scholar]Sutton, Matthew Avery. 2014. American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism. Cambridge: Belknap Press. [Google Scholar]Kruse, Kevin. 2015. One Nation under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. New York: Basic. [Google Scholar]Thompson, Michael. 2015. For God and Globe: Christian Internationalism in the United States between the Great War and the Cold War. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. [Google Scholar]Haselby, Sam. 2015. The Origins of American Religious Nationalism. New York: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar] © 2017 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Share and Cite MDPI and ACS Style Edwards, M. Religions Series: “Christian Nationalism in the United States”—Ebook Introduction. Religions 2017, 8, 93. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel8050093 AMA Style Edwards M. Religions Series: “Christian Nationalism in the United States”—Ebook Introduction. Religions. 2017; 8(5):93. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel8050093 Chicago/Turabian Style Edwards, Mark. 2017. "Religions Series: “Christian Nationalism in the United States”—Ebook Introduction" Religions 8, no. 5: 93. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel8050093 Find Other Styles Note that from the first issue of 2016, this journal uses article numbers instead of page numbers. See further details here. Article Metrics No No Article Access Statistics For more information on the journal statistics, click here. Multiple requests from the same IP address are counted as one view.

The Origins of American Religious Nationalism. By Sam Haselby.

The early United States claimed extensive territorial domains that created vexing problems for the nation’s Protestants. Sam Haselby’s recent book about this subject might be summarized as an argument for the significance of the frontier in American religious history. Indeed, Haselby identifies “the primary conflict in American religion during the early republic as one between frontier revivalism and a nationalist missions movement—in other words, not as denominational but as social and geographic” (p. 3). Furthermore, according to Haselby, this conflict “was essentially a contest for governance of the frontier” (p. 2). Haselby’s two broad categories include several religious movements. He identifies Methodists, Baptists, and Shakers, religious groups with large popular followings west of the Appalachian Mountains, as frontier revivalists. Northeastern Presbyterians and Congregationalists, along with their financial backers, created the nationalist missions movement, or “national evangelism,” as Haselby often labels his second broad category. Haselby argues that, in the absence of a strong early national state, frontier revivalists and national evangelists alike worked to build a moral society in the West. Frontier revivalists pursued this task by subjecting their daily lives to local religious controls. National evangelists looked to the West as they created well-funded reform associations and print networks to bring forth their country’s providential destiny. Over the course of seven chronologically-arranged chapters, Haselby explores the origins of frontier revivalism and national evangelism; conflicts between these two positions over beliefs, practices, and issues such as slavery and Indian removal; and finally how both positions contributed to the emergence of religious nationalism in American life that was both populist and providential. Haselby concludes that Andrew Jackson embodied this type of religious nationalism, which found its expression in Jacksonian politics.

The Origins of American Religious Nationalism by Sam Haselby

The Origins of American Religious Nationalism by Sam Haselby

The Origins of American Religious Nationalism by Sam Haselby

Reviewed by: The Origins of American Religious Nationalism by Sam Haselby Ava Chamberlain (bio) The Origins of American Religious Nationalism Sam Haselby New York: Oxford University Press, 2015 336 pp. The Origins of American Religious Nationalism is a frustrating book. Its central argument is important and provocative, but its development is disorganized, obscured by frequent digressions, and compromised by methodological problems. Haselby maintains that in the decades following the Revolution a distinctively American mode of nationalism developed. The defining features of this new American nationalism were populism, antielitism, racism, and religion, represented in their fullness by the presidency of Andrew Jackson. He argues persuasively that Protestant activism played a central role in creating this national identity. In his analysis, religion in the early Republic was not only shaped by political forces, it actively contributed to the formation of the nation. Given that this argument complicates a common paradigm, which views religion more as an effect than a cause, the book makes an important contribution. It is unfortunate, therefore, that its execution is flawed. Haselby begins by considering a commonly identified source of American nationalism, the foundational documents that informed the Revolution and determined the structure of the federal government. One of the book’s “revisionist claims” is that neither the Revolution nor the Constitution determined America’s national identity. “[T]he War of Independence,” Haselby writes, “posed rather than answered the question of American nationality” (1). Thomas Jefferson and James Madison offered one answer to this question in the framework of the federal government, which was weak [End Page 206] by design and secular by definition. They envisioned the gradual emergence of a secular American nation, in which religious belief is “private” and “remote from political power” (30). Although disestablishment succeeded, secular nationalism failed. Religion did not decline; it flourished as never before. Haselby locates the solution to the problem of American identity in the spiritual hothouse of the early Republic. Out of it emerged a distinctive religious nationalism that continues to influence party politics and outcomes of elections today. Haselby’s argument centers on the competition between two rival conceptions of evangelical Protestantism that developed in this period, which he labels “frontier revivalism and national evangelism” (2). The book’s central contribution lies in delineating the competing social and national visions of these two movements. The locus of their conflict was the American frontier, rapidly expanding with a diverse population of settlers and immigrants. This territory, Haselby argues, presented to the new Republic “two formidable nation-building challenges,” establishing sovereignty over the frontier and addressing Native Americans’ land claims (4). Both required a unifying idea of the nation, which the weak and secular federal government was ill equipped to provide. In the absence of a strong federal state, national evangelism and frontier revivalism developed as two competing approaches to the challenge of westward expansion. Haselby locates the seeds of national evangelism in the Connecticut Wits, the eighteenth-century literary movement founded by a group of Yale-educated writers having deep and aristocratic Puritan pedigrees. Admitting the Wits “were not great writers,” he concentrates on the nationalist message of their verse (64). His analysis focuses primarily on John Trumbull’s M’Fingal (1782) and Timothy Dwight’s Greenfield Hill (1794). Aiming to nationalize the regional culture of New England, these epic poems envisioned a Protestant America populated by hard-working, small property owners, who were educated and engaged in civic affairs (103). This image of America was undermined by Thomas Jefferson’s election, which promoted secularism and a rival national model based on Virginia planter society, and was discredited by the Hartford Convention. Despite these setbacks, its core nationalist vision reemerged in the missions movement organized and led by northern Protestants. Northern Protestants imagined America as a “sacred political community” unified by shared religious beliefs, social structures, and cultural [End Page 207] values (14). The principal challenge to the formation of this union was the western frontier, which from the perspective of these sober, middle-class Yankees was rapidly filling with people of questionable character, low morality, and heretical faith. To address this challenge northern Protestants became nation builders. Haselby labels this movement “national evangelism” because it viewed “missionary work...

The Origins of American Religious Nationalism. Sam Hasselby

The Origins of American Religious Nationalism. Sam Hasselby

The Origins of American Religious Nationalism

Introduction Chapter 1 Powers of the Earth: Secularism and American Nationalism Chapter 2 The Songs of a Nation: Connecticut Wits and the New English Empire Chapter 3 To Raise a Holy People, Wear No Slouched Hat: Methodist Settlement of the Frontier Chapter 4 Sovereignty and Salvation on the Frontier of the Early Republic Chapter 5 The Love of Order and Righteous Laws: Early National Liberals and the Missions Movement Chapter 6 A Complete Chain of Communication: Religious Literature and Protestant Nation-Building Epilogue-A Monster and the Wandering Savage: Resolution of Frontier Revivalism and National Evangelism Index

Sam Haselby.The Origins of American Religious Nationalism.

Sam Haselby.<i>The Origins of American Religious Nationalism</i>.

The Origins of American Religious Nationalism. By Sam Haselby.

<i>The Origins of American Religious Nationalism</i>. By Sam Haselby.

The Origins of American Religious Nationalism. By Sam Haselby. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. x + 336 pp. $74.00 cloth.

The Origins of American Religious Nationalism. By Sam Haselby. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. x + 336 pp. $74.00 cloth.

The origins of American religious nationalism

The origins of American religious nationalism

Yoruba Traditions and African American Religious Nationalism

Yoruba Traditions and African American Religious Nationalism

Yoruba Traditions and African American Religious Nationalism by Tracey E. Hucks

Yoruba Traditions and African American Religious Nationalism by Tracey E. Hucks

Tracey E. Hucks. Yoruba Traditions and African American Religious Nationalism.

Tracey E. Hucks. Yoruba Traditions and African American Religious Nationalism.

Yoruba traditions and African American religious nationalism

Exploring the Yoruba tradition in the United States, Hucks begins with the story of Nana Oseijeman Adefunmi's personal search for identity and meaning as a young man in Detroit in the 1930s and 1940s. She traces his development as an artist, religious leader, and founder of several African-influenced religio-cultural projects in Harlem and later in the South. Adefunmi was part of a generation of young migrants attracted to the bohemian lifestyle of New York City and the black nationalist fervor of Harlem. Cofounding Shango Temple in 1959, Yoruba Temple in 1960, and Oyotunji African Village in 1970, Adefunmi and other African Americans in that period renamed themselves Yorubas and engaged in the task of transforming Cuban Santeria into a new religious expression that satisfied their racial and nationalist leanings and eventually helped to place African Americans on a global religious schema alongside other Yoruba practitioners in Africa and the diaspora.Alongside the story of Adefunmi, Hucks weaves historical and sociological analyses of the relationship between black cultural nationalism and reinterpretations of the meaning of Africa from within the African American community.Part of the Religions of the Americas Series

Mark Twain's Final Offensive: 'the War-Prayer' and American Religious Nationalism

Mark Twain Studies Vol. 2 Mark Twain’s Final Offensive: ”The War-Prayer” and American Religious Nationalism Christopher VAUGHAN Mark Twain’s “The War-Prayer,” while clearly grounded in the outbreak of the Span- ish-American war at a time when volunteers were the primary  ghting force, drew upon the succeeding years in which professional troops replaced the generally rag-tag volun- teers who  rst mustered in the thousands for a taste of martial glory wherever it was be- ing served up. Twain spoke in his indictment of the invocation of divine favoritism to a broader group of volunteers, however, in addressing the faithful who offered up their sup- port for the war, in whatever forms it had taken or would take. By the time he attempted to circulate it, the Philippine “insurrection” had been declared over, unilaterally, on the symbolic date of July 4, 1902. But the conquest of the Islamic southern Philippines, where the Spanish had never fully gained control and where resistance was persisting against the new foreign invasion, had continued to pique Twain’s anti-imperialist ire. The politi- cally-inected religious framework in which he couched “The War-Prayer” is thus worth contemplating. In positing an unspoken will to destruction among the pastors joining patriotic fervor to religious beseeching of the Almighty, Twain aimed his rapier wit not only at national- ism, but at the un-Christian version of Christianity used to justify the slaughter of the Fili-