Montpelier Visit and Conference
James Madison's Montpelier is located about 25 miles northwest from Charlottesville, Virginia and was the family plantation for the Madison family. The fourth president and his wife Dolly Madison lived here. For a map of James Madison's Montpelier, click HERE.
Panel Topic: "American Identity: Issues, Challenges and Future Prospects Related to Growing Diversity."
Presentation: Christian America? Demographics, Law, and Public Life
Matthew Hedstrom, University of Virginia
NOTES: Christian affiliation is declining and disaffiliation is rising. The term "post-Christian" is a helpful descriptive term. In many ways, younger Americans are less religious than older Americans.
During the founding period, the U.S. was around 95% Protestant. Despite this majority, there was a question about how to deal with religious diversity. There were many differences and distinctions between Protestants. The U.S. is both very secular and very Christian at the same time. The American Revolution was quite radical in that it challenged the monarchy and established religion. Hedstrom says that because of the Protestant majority, the founders felt free to include "the Turks" the Jews in running for public office because they assumed that the US would continue to have a solid majority. In many ways, laws and customs maintained a kind of Christian hegemony. Supreme Courts cases of the 20th Century challenged this such as the cases pertaining to prayer and Bible reading in public schools.
How do Americans think of themselves as a member of the nation? The concept of civil religion is an important. How did national identity become a such a powerful force that people are willing to die for it? American nationalism has become sacred. The president functions like a high priest in certain rituals, in the capitol dome, Washington's Apotheosis in the capitol dome.
Closing question: Is America a Christian nation? Civil religion borrows from Christianity but is not the same thing. Hedstrom's conclusion is that most Americans are bi-religious.
Bio: Dr. Hedstrom is a historian of the United States specializing in religion and culture in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His central questions probe the intersections of American modernity and Protestant and post-Protestant religious modernity in the United States. He also has a longstanding and ongoing interest in the history of the book, especially as it applies to American religious history. Race, religion and psychology, the history of spirituality, mass culture, religious liberalism, cosmopolitanism and internationalism all figure into my research and teaching. He is now researching and writing a book called The Religion of Humanity: Faith, Politics, and the United Nations. This book explores the deep religious history of the United Nations—the religion of the UN as much as religion in and about the UN. The project reaches back into the nineteenth century and forward to the late twentieth, but is centrally concerned with the UN and its American religious contexts, conflicts, and constituencies in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. The long arc of the plot follows the intersecting histories of two great liberal dreams of the modern age—the religious vision of a “religion of humanity” and the political vision of world government—as they converged and diverged across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Read more here. Dr. Hedstrom teaches several courses including Historiography Seminar in American Religion, “Spiritual But Not Religious”: Spirituality in America, Theories and Methods of American Studies, Varieties of Religious Experience, Christian America?: Religious Diversity and National Identity, and Visions of Apocalypse in American Culture. His first book, The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century, employs novel sources in book history to tell the surprising story of religious liberalism’s cultural ascendancy in the twentieth century. The religious middlebrow culture of mid-century brought psychological, mystical, and cosmopolitan forms of spirituality to broad swaths of the American middle class. This book was awarded the 2013 Brewer Prize from the American Society for Church History.
Presentation: "Melting Pot, Stew, Salad? Why Americans Debate Race and Religion"
Mary Beth Matthews (Links to an external site.), University of Mary Washington
NOTES: The notion melting pot came from a play. America is the great crucible in which immigrants are melted. "God is making the American." Anything that is not American should be burned off. The old world ideas and mentalities are burned off. White Protestantism became the standard. When Matthews teaches a US history course, she does not start with the Puritans, she begins with native people, Catholics, etc. The category of race is a social construct.
She showed a picture of her family who came from Italy. Her family were considered by to be not white but "Italian." This categorization was due to their Catholic religion. Her Finnish family members were classified as white because they were Lutheran. White Protestant served as the default standard of what it means to be American.
Bio: A.B., The College of William and Mary; M.A., Ph.D., University of Virginia. Dr. Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews teaches courses in American and European religious history, and her areas of specialty include American religious history, Protestant fundamentalism and evangelicalism, African-American religions, and religion and politics in the United States.Her published work includes Doctrine and Race: African American Evangelicals and Fundamentalism Between the Wars (University of Alabama Press, 2017) and Rethinking Zion: How the Print Media Placed Fundamentalism in the South (University of Tennessee Press, 2006), and she has given presentations at numerous conferences.Between college and graduate school, Dr. Mathews worked on Capitol Hill, first with a U.S. Senator and then a member of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Presentation: Religion and Conflict
Peter Ochs (Links to an external site.), University of Virginia
"Diagnosing Religious Dimensions of Ongoing Violent Conflicts"
Resources: Hearth to Hearth Peace-Building, Value Predictive Analysis lecture slides,
Bio: Peter Ochs is Edgar Bronfman Professor of Modern Judaic Studies at the University of Virginia. He co-directs the UVA Research Initiative on Religion, Politics, and Conflict; and he directs the Religious Studies PhD program in Scripture, Interpretation, and Practice, and the MA program in Religion Politics and Conflict. Ochs co-founded the Societies for Textual Reasoning and for Scriptural Reasoning. Among his publications are 200 essays in Jewish philosophy and theology, pragmatism and semiotics, the logic of scripture, religion and conflict, comparative Abrahamic scriptural traditions, and Jewish-Christian-Muslim theological dialogue. Among his books are Religion Without Violence: The Practice and Philosophy of Scriptural Reasoning (in press); Another Reformation: Postliberal Christianity and the Jews; The Free Church and Israel’s Covenant; Wording a Radiance, by Daniel Hardy with Ford, Ford, and Ochs; Breaking the Tablets: Jewish Theology After Shoah,by David Halivni with Ochs; Peirce, Pragmatism and the Logic of Scripture; the edited collections The Return to Scripture in Judaism and Christianity;Understanding the Rabbinic Mind; and (co-edited) Christianity in Jewish Terms and Textual Reasonings. Ochs’ current book project is Value Predicate Analysis: How to Diagnose Religion Dimensions of On-Going Violent Conflicts.
Roundtable Discussion in Small Groups
Scholars will be asked to choose one of the speakers to continue to discuss the following questions in small groups.
Prompt #1: What do I still want to understand better about religious pluralism/freedom in the U.S.? In what ways can approaches to religious pluralism/freedom in the U.S. be helpful or relevant in my home country?
Prompt #2: “Given what I have seen and learned in the United States, what do I think is the most pressing challenge in my home country as it relates to religious pluralism/freedom? How can my scholarship, civic leadership, and/or religious leadership address this challenge?”
