Divine Entanglements: Religious Claims-making and American Democracy.

Abstract

This dissertation offers a theoretical account of Protestant Christianity in American democratic politics that attends to the habits of mind and body religious traditions generate. Challenging contemporary political theory’s predominant focus on the epistemological, normative, and cognitive dimensions of religious doctrine and belief, I investigate how the performative repertoires or cultus supplied by evangelical strains of Christianity combine sensibility and practice to constitute political subjects. I develop this alternative account through an engagement with recent work in post-secularist religious studies and the politics of aesthetic experience. This dissertation furthers these scholarly discussions through the theorization of how the practice of religious claims-making both draws from and fuels an American democratic imaginary in which entanglements with the divine and the sacred are part and parcel of self-governance. My study of the entanglements between Christianity and American democracy as lived experiences of collective and agonistic world-making illuminates the irreducible affective and aesthetic dimensions of political life and the cultural bases necessary to sustain a democratic order.

Each chapter focuses on different case studies in order to interrogate the interplay of Christian traditions and American democracy. Chapter One studies evangelical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison to argue for a re-conceptualization of American civil religion from a relatively static body of consensual beliefs and values to a poetic mode of claims-making that facilitates the re-fashioning of democratic ideals and identities rather. Chapter Two examines John Brown and Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry as examples of religious zealotry, specifically attending to how their fanaticism relates to American democratic structures of feeling. Chapter Three expands and refines the concept of the cultus through an analysis of the Social Gospel and how its body of aesthetic forms conditions a conversion of thought, feeling, and imagination foundational for a politics of social justice. Chapter Four considers the performances of George W. Bush, Jerry Falwell and Jeremiah Wright after the September 11, 2001 attacks to explore the role of Christian forms and rhetoric in the politics of public mourning and the process of political reconstitution following collective traumas.