“Beyond the Protestant Nation” Off to the Presses!

Chris Cantwell — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 22:15:06 +0000

At the American Historical Association‘s 2011 annual meeting in Boston, I chaired a roundtable that featured a number of American religious historians on the Protestant bias of the American historical narrative. Titled “Beyond the Protestant Nation,” the roundtable featured Catherine Albanese, Lila Corwin Berwin, Wallace Best, Richard Bushman, Robert Orsi, and myself and asked what would happen if other, purportedly more “minor” religious traditions were given the same interpretive weight as Protestantism? If Catholic street feste to particular saints or the practice of possession in Haitian Vodou communities were allowed to speak as broadly as the Protestant work ethic or evangelical yearnings to be reborn? Our concern was not simply to add new religious subjects to U.S. survey, but to challenge historians to consider the variety of American religious subjectivities.

The roundtable was well attended and yielded a productive discussion on how to include these various religiosities in our research and teaching. But the discussion did not end in Boston. Later this year Fides et Historia, the quarterly journal of the Conference on Faith and History, will publish the roundtable as a special forum in its Winter/Spring edition. All of the roundtable’s original participants graciously agreed to publish there remarks, and I just sent in my introduction to the forum. I look forward to working with the editors at Fides, and to seeing the roundtable in print. Hopefully it will encourage scholars to think about their teaching and research from a more robustly pluralistic perspective.

Christopher D. Cantwell, Ph.D.

“Beyond the Protestant Nation” Off to the Presses!