Saving History
How White Evangelicals Tour the Nation's Capital and Redeem a Christian America
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Millions of tourists visit Washington, D.C., every year, but for some the experience is about much more than sightseeing. Lauren R. Kerby's lively book takes readers onto tour buses and explores the world of Christian heritage tourism. These expeditions visit the same attractions as their secular counterparts—Capitol Hill, the Washington Monument, the war memorials, and much more—but the white evangelicals who flock to the tours are searching for evidence that America was founded as a Christian nation.
The tours preach a historical jeremiad that resonates far beyond Washington. White evangelicals across the United States tell stories of the nation's Christian origins, its subsequent fall into moral and spiritual corruption, and its need for repentance and return to founding principles. This vision of American history, Kerby finds, is white evangelicals' most powerful political resource—it allows them to shapeshift between the roles of faithful patriots and persecuted outsiders. In an era when white evangelicals' political commitments baffle many observers, this book offers a key for understanding how they continually reimagine the American story and their own place in it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kerby, religious studies scholar at Harvard Divinity School, explores in her excellent debut the historical and political narratives crafted and reinforced by Christian heritage tourism in Washington, D.C. Using field research and interviews, she discovers that tour guides and tourists share a common set of beliefs about the role of white Christian evangelicals in American history formed through Christian nationalist literature, such as Peter Marshall and David Manuel's 1977 bestseller, The Light and the Glory which shape their encounter with D.C. long before they set foot in the capital. Kerby explains how white Christian evangelicals understand themselves as the rightful religious and political heirs of America's founders, as moral leaders in exile, as victims of secularizing agents who seek to erase Christianity from the public square, and as rightful saviors of a nation in spiritual and political jeopardy. Her interviews reveal that Christian heritage tourism has an explicit political purpose, encouraging a "restorative nostalgia" in participants who are "tasked with learning the nation's Christian history and using it to restore the nation to its previous Christian ideals." Thoughtfully documenting and reflecting upon the contours of a uniquely American subculture, this ethnographic study will appeal to anyone interested in the pull of American Christian nationalism.
