The Religious Nationalism Podcast

In this episode, D. G. Hart and Crawford Gribben compare their recent books, "American Catholic: The politics of faith during the Cold War" and "The rise and fall of Christian Ireland," thinking about how the similar religious traditions they describe can interact with different political cultures, and with very different results. 

For further reading:

D. G. Hart, American Catholic: The politics of faith during the Cold War

Crawford Gribben, The rise and fall of Christian Ireland

Michael Brendan Dougherty, My father left me Ireland

Gribben's review of Dougherty, My father left me Ireland, in The Wall Street Journal

In episode 13, Darryl Hart and Crawford Gribben talk to Alex Titov about religious nationalism in Russia. Alex teaches history at Queen's University Belfast, where his research and teaching focus on Russian nationalism, foreign policy, the political history of the USSR, and the biography of Nikita Khrushchev. Alex is a prolific journalist and a frequent broadcaster. You can follow his work on Twitter at @TitovAlexander.

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Orthodox Church: biggest split in a thousand years triggered over Ukraine

In episode 12, Darryl Hart and Crawford Gribben talk to Dave Stewart about religious nationalism in early modern Spain. Dave is professor of history at Hillsdale College, MI, and a scholar of religious identities in early modern France and Spain. How did the fifteenth-century re-conquest of the Iberian peninsula contribute to the emergence of a distinct sense of religious responsibility in the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds? Why did protestant reform make such little impact in the region? And how did the political turbulence of the nineteenth century feed into the social and political pressures that erupted in civil war and the birth of Franco-ism?  

National identities based on church membership may have come more readily to Protestant countries in Europe, but Catholic kingdoms and nations also drew heavily on Christian identity.  The case of France, the subject of this episode, is an important reminder of the way that the Catholic Church was entangled in the political institutions (in this case, the monarchy) and cultural expectations that gave the French a unique identity.  The French Revolution, which eventually took an anti-clerical turn, did fundamentally reset the terms of French national identity.  But the legacy of the medieval church, the Reformation, religious wars, and the Edict of Nantes (1598) did not simply vanish after 1798.  To provide guidance on French religious nationalism, D. G. Hart (flying solo this time) interviewed Ullrich Langer, Professor of French (emeritus) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  His specialties include sixteenth-century poetry and prose; Renaissance intellectual history (especially moral philosophy and political theory), and religious conflict in France during the Reformation.  

This recorded lecture, sponsored by the History Department, took place at Hillsdale College on April 15, 2021 to promote D. G. Hart's new book, American Catholic: The Politics of Faith During the Cold War (Cornell University Press).  It is a companion piece to an earlier episode with Daniel McCarthy on Roman Catholics and Christian nationalism in the U.S. 

Below is a bibliography of works mentioned in the presentation: 

Paul Blanshard, American Freedom and Catholic Power (Beacon, 1949)

William F. Buckley, Jr., God and Man at Yale (Regnery, 1951)

John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition (Sheed & Ward, 1960)

Phyllis Schlafly, A Choice Not an Echo (Pere Marquette Press, 1964)

Richard John Neuhaus, The Catholic Moment: The Paradox of the Church in the Post-Modern World (Harper & Row, 1987)

Charles R. Morris, American Catholic: The Saints and Sinners Who Built America's Most Powerful Church (Times Books, 1997)

John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (W. W. Norton, 2003)

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics (Free Press, 2012)

Thomas J. Sugrue, “The Catholic Encounter with the 1960s,” in Catholics in the American Century: Recasting Narratives of U.S. History, ed., R. Scott Apple and Kathleen Sprows Cummings (Cornell University Press, 2012)

Joseph Bottum, An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America (Image, 2014)

Sam Haselby, The Origins of American Religious Nationalism (Oxford University Press, 2016)

James Chappel, Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church(Harvard University Press, 2018)

Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (Yale University Press, 2018)

D. G. Hart, American Catholic: The Politics of Faith During the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2020)

Massimo Faggioli, Joe Biden and Catholicism in the United States (Bayard, 2021)

In episode 9, Darryl Hart and Crawford Gribben talk to Adam Mestyan. Adam teaches history at Duke University, NC, and is the author and editor of numerous books and articles, including Arab patriotism: The ideology and culture of power in late Ottoman Egypt (2017) and Primordial history, print capitalism, and Egyptology in nineteenth-century Cairo: Muṣṭafā Salāma al-Naǧǧārī’s The Garden of Ismail’s Praise (2021), along with numerous scholarly articles and publications in venues such as Aeon. You can learn more about Adam's work on Twitter at @adammestyan.

In episode 8, Darryl Hart and Crawford Gribben talk to Daniel McCarthy about "Americanism" - the effort by many American Catholics to fit the church's teachings to the constitutional and cultural expectations of the republic - and the efforts made by integralists to resist it. Dan is well-known as the editor of Modern Age, as a contributor to The Spectator and as a visiting fellow at the Center for the Study of Statesmanship at the Catholic University of America. Dan also runs the Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship Program at the Fund for American Studies (currently open for applications).

You can find a quick summary of the debate about Americanism and integralism in this article. Darryl has reconstructed the history of Americanism in his recently published book, American Catholic: The politics of faith during the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2020). Dan publishes widely. His recent article on economic nationalism gives a taster for his new book, American nationalism: A manifesto, which will be published next year. 

Darryl Hart and Crawford Gribben talk to Samuel Goldman, who teaches political science at George Washington University, DC, about the "putsch" at the US Capitol, and Jewish and Christian Zionism. Samuel is well-known as the author of God’s Country: Christian Zionism in America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) and of articles and op-eds in venues such as Modern Age: A Conservative Quarterly and The American Conservative, as well as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. His next book - After Nationalism - will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in early 2021. You can follow him on Twitter at @SWGoldman.

You can read more of Sam's work here:

After Nationalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021)

"The Putsch at the US Capitol," Providence magazine (11 January 2021)

"Reflection on Election 2020: Conversation with Sam Goldman," Providence magazine (30 October 2020)

"Nationalists Don’t See What Is Special About Our Biblical Nation," New York Times (9 September 2019)

God’s Country: Christian Zionism in America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018)

Darryl Hart and Crawford Gribben talk to Melani McAlister about American evangelicals, international missions, and national identity. Melani is professor of American Studies and International Affairs at the George Washington University, in Washington DC,  and the author of Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945 and The Kingdom of God Has No Borders: A Global History of American Evangelicals, along with many popular and scholarly articles. She is currently editing volume 4 of The Cambridge History of America and the World.

You can read more about Melani's work here:

"Prophecy, Politics, and the Popular: The Left Behind Series and Christian Fundamentalism's New World Order," South Atlantic Quarterly (2003) 102(4):773-798 

Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) 

"US Evangelicals and the Politics of Slave Redemption as Religious Freedom in Sudan," South Atlantic Quarterly (2014) 113 (1): 87–108 

The Kingdom of God Has No Borders: A Global History of American Evangelicals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018) 

Darryl Hart and Crawford Gribben talk to Graham Walker about nationalism, unionism and religion in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Graham is professor of politics at Queen's University Belfast, and the author of numerous articles and books including The Labour Party in Scotland: Religion, The Union and the Irish Dimension (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 

Further reading:

A history of the Ulster Unionist Party: Protest, pragmatism and pessimism (Manchester Studies in Modern History, Manchester UP)  

“The Religion Factor” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History  

"Scotland's Sectarianism Problem: Irish Answers?" The Political Quarterly 

“The Ulster Covenant and the Pulse of Protestant Ulster,” National Identities 

The Labour Party in Scotland: Religion, The Union and the Irish Dimension (Palgrave Macmillan)

“Ideological content and institutional frameworks: Unionist identities in Northern Ireland and Scotland,” Irish Studies Review