Amy Frykholm: Welcome back to In Search Of, where we go in search of voices and perspectives to expand and enrich a life of faith. I'm Amy Frykholm, senior editor at The Christian Century and your guide for this season, a journey in search of truth. Last week, I hope many of you listened while we talked with Elizabeth Schrader Poczer about her groundbreaking work in biblical studies, especially on Mary Magdalene. And I hope you took a moment, not only to enjoy the episode, but also to listen to her haunting song that started the whole journey, and if you don't know where to find this song, please go to our website, christiancentury.org/insearchof and look in the show notes for last week's episode.
This week, we're searching for truth in American history. I have, for one, been fascinated as we've begun to retell the story of our country. I've learned a great deal from efforts like The 1619 Project that have truly taken on the renarration of the history of our country in a life-giving direction. And I've been absolutely fascinated to watch monuments erected in another era, that told a different story of American history, fall. So I'm excited this week to talk with historian Peter Choi about all of this.
Peter is an associate professor of American Christianity at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley and his areas of study include transatlantic revival, religion, early evangelicalism, and world Christianity. His specialty is the 18th century and his latest book is called Subverting Faith: Early Evangelicals and the Making of Race, which is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
Peter, thank you so much for joining us today on In Search Of. I want to talk to you today about history and truth and especially American history and the pursuit of its truth.
Peter Choi: Thank you so much, Amy. It's really good to be here with you.
AF: I am coming to this interview with the perspective that, or maybe it's the hope that we as Americans are maybe in the middle of an important moment in rethinking our own history and how we tell the story of who we are as a people and what we want, and what we desire and how we've shaped our nation, and how we've gotten stuck in various places and have to confront many horrors of our history. And I've been thinking a lot about James Baldwin's essay “Letter from a Region in my Mind,” which I really, really love. I love that essay. And I love how he grapples with the myths that white Americans hold about themselves and their history and how their refusal to think through those myths and re-examine where they come from and how they've transformed us, have really prevented us from moving forward as a country.
And I guess I wonder if you agree with me that we're at this moment for potential reckoning. And then I also wonder a lot if white Americans in particular have the courage and the stamina to undertake this reexamination. And I'd love to just hear you speak to that: are we in the midst of some kind of reckoning and what do you take to be the myths that most need rethinking.
PC: Well, I love the question, and I love the work of James Baldwin and how that sets the stage for the questions that you're asking because I think it's so true. It seems to me that we have, especially over the past number of years, experienced bursts of reckoning. Things happen in the news and people have to grapple with the shock and frankly the horror of things that erupt in the world. And I think my sense is that especially for my white American and particularly white American Christian friends, there has been this genuine desire to understand why it is that our racial problems as a country are so deeply embedded and intractable.
The other thing that occurs to me is that these reckonings come in bursts. And so they're very much dependent on the news cycle. And with the course of time, the guilt becomes a catalyst, but it also becomes overwhelming. And so it doesn't last very long and it goes dormant until the next big news hits the headlines and jars our memories again. And so I think that there's a difference in how people experience the things that we're encountering in the world and in the news.
I would say people of color have long wrestled with some of these ideas and the realities of racial injustice that are just coming to the attention of some folks in the country. And so there is an imbalance. It's going to be experienced differently based on one's social location and upbringing and the kinds of experiences that you've had in your life. And I think that's what makes the work so hard is that we have such, all of us have such different starting points for how we experience what's happening in the world and then all kinds of different responses to that as well.
AF: It seems like one thing that we have seen over the past few years is monument removal that we could point to as maybe one tangible or concrete possibility of myth deconstruction. Can you talk about, first of all, the relationship between monuments and myths, and then, how you evaluate monument removal?
PC: Yeah, well, so with the removal of monuments, we are seeing a literal, physical changing of the landscape, which is reason to hope, right? Because we're seeing really concrete alterations in how we move through the world and the things that we encounter as we move through the world.
And it also strikes me that monuments come from a very particular way of trying to preserve the memory of past events and persons. It may be obvious when I state it, but monuments are never or almost never created in the context of that original historical moment. There's often a distance between the moment that's being memorialized and the time when these monuments are being constructed. And so there's a very particular kind of remembering and an attempt at meaning-making that's happening in the construction of those monuments. And, frankly, there's a lot of erasure and selective memory that's occurring in those moments.
And so when we remove monuments, I suppose there's an attempt to remove some of the erasure that happened with the creation, the construction of those monuments. And there's an attempt, or at least a desire to retrieve a fuller understanding of past events, realizing that we're always going to have obstructions to our view of the past, and so we're never going to have a full or comprehensive understanding, but we are able to to chip away at some of the cruft that has made our remembering problematic or incomplete.
AF: Yeah, it's interesting to notice that it's a form of erasure that asks for or demands a different evaluation of the truth of history. So we remove something, right? We take something away. We don't necessarily, at least not right away, replace it. But at the same time, it's a request that we might view history differently.
PC: Yeah, I mean, is it possible to have a blank slate at that moment? Probably not, but it is a recognition that we have to do better, that we have to work at building new memories and work at writing new histories that are as faithful as possible to the past and also that are going to undergo constant revision.
I mean, I think this is the critique leveled against historians oftentimes, that we're always revising the facts of history. But I think it's a recognition of our finite limits, right? As human beings and the fact that we are always works in progress and that we always need to be in conversation with each other and with people who've gone before us.
AF: And a monument does try to kind of stop that process. Right. It kind of wants to, like, stop and say, this is irrefutable. This is irrefutably good. That's why we're making a monument to it. So it's interesting the way that a monument can actually stop a conversation instead of spur one.
PC: Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's basically an attempt to present the final word on a person's accomplishments, right? What you're doing is capturing one moment in time and saying, this person, yes, this is a complicated human being with blemishes, but in this one moment of glory that we're going to memorialize and try to preserve for a very long time, if not permanently, this is something to be celebrated and this is something by which we measure ourselves.
And there's something about trying to capture a glorious snapshot of the past that I think can't help but ride roughshod over the complexities of a person's experiences and the complexities and the multiple angles of past events.
AF: So Peter, I know you're familiar with this problem because of the removal of a statue of George Whitefield at the University of Pennsylvania. And you wrote about that removal. And you said that the removal of this monument in particular could be good for evangelicals who appeared to be hurt by the removal of one of their heroes, one of the people that they deeply admire in history. But you also said that it could be good for us as a nation, as a whole. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about this. So why was the George Whitfield statue removed? And how was this monument removal beneficial, do you think?
PC: Yeah, I mean the reason that was given, this was a number of years ago, in the time of racial reckoning, during the pandemic, so was it maybe 2020. I think maybe fall of 2020. The board of trustees, I believe the University of Pennsylvania, decided that this statue which had been on campus since its unveiling in 1919, was going to be removed. And so again, the monument wasn't put up in the 18th century. It was put up two centuries later, trying to preserve a very particular narrative about this person's contributions to colonial Pennsylvania, but also the American nation and American Christianity.
And it had become a site of pilgrimage. I knew of people who took pilgrimages to this statue. And it was a religious experience for people. And, you know, there's aspects of this that are probably positive.
But I think the reason, the reason that was cited was that Whitefield was a slave owner, and that he was someone who advocated the legalization and the expansion of slavery, especially in the colony of Georgia in his lifetime, which for many decades had outlawed slavery. And so it was trying to come to grips with a pretty unsavory past.
And I think many of us had different motivations and different ways of engaging in that removal perhaps, or understanding that removal. But I think collectively what we were saying was we refuse to turn the memory of this person into some kind of sanctified, heroic story that all of us are then called to emulate and make pilgrimages to this place, trying to aspiring to be like this person. And what we were saying was that not only the history of this nation, but the history of the religious tradition that ascribes to the memory of Whitefield has some problematic aspects to it. That there are sin aspects to it that we have to recognize, that we have to come to repentance over. And it seemed like an opportunity to have some great conversation.
I think what ended up happening was that fans and admirers of Whitefield were very much insulted by that removal. And then the people who celebrated the removal of the statue went about their business. Right. There wasn't the kind of, and I think this is what I was trying to refer to earlier, that these bursts of reckoning oftentimes don't lead to the kind of judicious deep and probing conversation that we would hope. But these are opportunities, right? And that's not gonna be the last opportunity that we have. And so hopefully over time we become more open to engaging in these conversations in ways that hopefully will bear fruit.
AF: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. That, you know, okay, the battle's over, the statue's down, moving on. Some people retain a sense of hurt, other people feel a sense of accomplishment. And then where does the conversation go from there? How do you keep talking? What does talking look like? Do you have thoughts about that? Like, is there some way that you'd like to have seen that conversation progress, that just didn't seem possible in the moment?
PC: Yeah, I mean, I really appreciate how you characterize it because there is, kind of, a reinforcement of the battle lines, as much as that metaphor may be unhelpful. And so what we would hope for, I think, is curiosity in that moment. Asking deeper questions about why it is that we heroize certain people, trying to understand the legacy of not just Whitfield the person, but all the people who came after him who celebrated and memorialized his contributions.
I mean, I think many people were shocked and horrified that someone that they thought was a great Christian leader was actually very much not only complicit, but responsible for the spread of slavery. And so there was a kind of a moment of repentance and reckoning there. I wonder if there could have been even more of that, leaning into that and then trying to figure out, okay, what do we build from here on out? Right? Because this is the criticism leveled against anti-racists; it's a movement known by what they're against. Well, what do you want to build in its place? I think it's a question that's really important and it's going to take collective wisdom and conversation to make any progress in the face of these questions. And so I think that maybe openness to what the ramifications of what Whitefield's legacy have been...
So a counter argument to the removal of the monument was, well, if you just get rid of it, it's just gone and there's no talking, there's no opportunity to talk about these things anymore. And I don't think that's true, right? Just because the actual physical monument is gone doesn't mean that our memory of it and the ways in which we have been telling stories around it are gone.
And so I think it's a really good question that I don't really have an answer to. What does it mean to, instead of putting down battle lines, what does it mean to open up avenues of conversation? I think that's the hope, that’s the aspiration, and it seems like we're not very good at it.
AF: So, as you tell it, Whitefield’s statue was part of a kind of myth-making attempt. To tell a particular kind of story about who that man was, what he had done, and what it might mean to us, to the people who inherited this story. And the removal of the statue was an attempt to correct that mythmaking, to not just tell a new story, but to tell an old story in a new way. Can you talk a little bit about the connection between myth and myth-making and history?
PC: Myth making is simply meaning making through stories. And I don't think that we can do away with myths, because we can't do any better, right? We can't have 100% completely accurate representations of the past. We're always going to have some kind of imperfect rendering that still insists on deriving meaning from the past. And so I think, my sense is that it's not feasible or desirable to do away with myths. But I think we need better ones and maybe more conversation between myths.
And so maybe it's not that we have one dominant story that defines who we are and how we think about ourselves. But what would it look like if we had multiple versions of stories that are in conversation with one another and sometimes contradicting and conflicting with one another. And that conflict leads to better and deeper conversations. And so our desire to impose meaning on the past is not gonna go away, but perhaps our humility and curiosity can be multiplied so that as we encounter these myths, we realize that there are different people in the world who have different ways of imposing or deriving meaning from the past. So I guess that's my identitive or provisional sort of solution or wondering, is what would it look like to have more myths in conversation?
AF: It makes me think about when I was looking into curricula that the state of Texas was trying to implement in relationship to American history. And so often the view seems to be, if we can't have the myths that we've always had, then instead we just won't talk about these things at all. So if we can't tell the story of, for example, native American identity, the way that we've always told it, you know, for however many years it's been a part of the American history curriculum in Texas, then we're just not gonna talk about Native Americans at all.
PC: Yeah, I mean, I'm not familiar with that case, but it sounds like what they're calling for is the erasure, right, or the deletion of an entire people group from their history textbooks. And that just seems like a drastic, an extreme overreaction to something that presents us with discomfort.
There are so many aspects of my own personal history that I could just say, you know, I want to do away with it and I don't want it to be part of my life. But it would not cease to be a part of my formative experiences.
And so I think about the fact that when we talk about whiteness in American society today, it's going to be received in very different ways. But what does it mean to simply recognize that in 1790 already, that was the first instance of the Naturalization Act, which regulated how people became citizens. There was a very explicit statement in 1790 already that the requirements for citizenship included a person being free and white. And that just became a part of the definition of what it meant to be an American citizen. And it was a decision that was revised and refined and reiterated over time, throughout the 19th century and the 20th century. And so there have been Supreme Court cases that revisited the definition of power, of the Naturalization Act and basically said, yes, that's true. Only white people, only Caucasians can be citizens in this country. And so there were cases in 1922 and 1923 re-inscribing that notion.
So what does it mean to do business with that history? I don't think that we can just gloss over it or say it didn't happen. And so those are the hard questions before us.
AF: In your work, you've taken on some of the myths of evangelical history. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that, what you've seen in your study of the history of white evangelicalism in this country
PC: There is sort of this myth of evangelical abolitionism that seems to cover over the sins of slavery. And so, it's been really interesting for me to look at the longer history of abolition and to recognize that White evangelicals were not the pioneers of abolition. It was enslaved people. Right. It was people of color who were agitating for their freedom. I mean, that sounds really obvious, but that gets lost in the history. It's usually William Wilberforce and Granville Sharp. So looking at sort of the ways in which they, even while being progressive reformers for their time, had imbibed a racialized vision of the world.
I come up with kind of a typology of four ways of approaching slavery in the 18th century. And so abolition is one of them. But there's also justification or rationalization, right? Hey, like, at least these pagans are being converted, becoming Christians. And then there's amelioration. Like, slavery is evil, but can we make it more comfortable for these folks? And then they'll be more ready to hear the gospel. And then there's abolition. And then after abolition, there's already kind of a vision of reparation in the 18th century because people are colonists and early citizens of the New Republic are having to deal with these freed Black persons, and their solution is colonization. Let's send them back to Africa. And that's their reparation project. And so it's not just abolition. There's so much else that happens.
AF: I know I talked about this like evangelical history is somehow separate from mainline Christian history. And I know that's not really a distinction that makes a lot of sense when we're talking about the 18th century. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how this applies to what we call today “mainline Christians.”
PC: I think The Christian Century has a really critical role to play in this because you have such a broad audience. And oftentimes what mainline Protestants would say is, well, that's an evangelical problem. We're not like this.
AF: Right, exactly.
PC: I mean, this, I tell my Episcopalian friends, you guys are the original Church of Empire. You know, and for mainline churches, like, when did you start ordaining women? Maybe in the seventies. It wasn't that long ago.
AF: It wasn't that long ago.
PC: You know, and to say that it's only white, it's only evangelicals who are patriarchal and racist, I think is really problematic.
AF: I think so too. And I think we haven't even begun to grapple with that. It seems like just opening up a question, a conversation about whiteness. In fact, all of these myths that I feel like I want to take apart or undo have kind of, at their root, the mystification of whiteness and its relationship to America. I feel like that is so often the starting place.
PC: Yeah. And this is a talking point that often comes up when we talk about race as a social construct. And we say that race doesn't really exist in some ways. And then some people will say, who feel really uncomfortable with the conversations around racism, we'll say, well, let's just not talk about race. And we can't do that either, right? Because race, even if it is a social construct that has no basis in biological reality, it still is something that very much affects the ways that we relate to one another. And so how do we, um, how do we grapple with that? And how do we come to an understanding of one another in the midst of our racialized society?
I mean, I think that those are the kinds of questions that look very different today than they would've in the beginning or at an earlier period of time. And so trying to peel away the layers in 2022 is going to look very different than having a conversation like this in the 18th century. And I think that's what makes it so daunting and at the same time incredibly urgent and important for us to have as well.
AF: One of the things that's really fascinated me in recent years is Nikole Hannah-Jones' retelling of the US origin story from the perspective of 1619, so the year that the transatlantic slave trade began. And she kind of uses this emblem of 1619 to retell the story instead of, or alongside of, 1776. Like she wants that number to be in people's minds as a moment of American history that they can then use to grapple with the present.
And I think she's been really successful in embroiling the country in controversy over that and I think in inspiring people's imaginations. Maybe she even is letting us, or showing us, how we can tell a different story about the nation. And I'm not arguing in any way that we've reached consensus about that or what that means, but I feel like it's opened up some new possibilities. And I wonder if you have been interested as well in this kind of retelling project, maybe The 1619 Project itself, but also from the perspective of an American historian. How do you evaluate that kind of retelling?
PC: I think it's a fascinating question because it has been such a helpful, provocative reminder to us that the ways that we are accustomed to doing history always need to be recalibrated and that we have blind spots. And so just think about what it means to begin the story of this nation in 1776. There's a lot of heroism, right? There's a lot of fighting against the big, the great big evil empire of Britain. But what happens when you go back a few decades, even a few centuries, is you begin to realize that there's a lot of Britain in America and there's a lot of Britain, like, there's a lot of imperial thinking amongst the white American colonists.
And so I think what something like The 1619 Project is doing is saying, hey, we think that we've rendered a final version of American history, or at least of the 18th century, or at least of the founding period, and the founders, but there's actually much more, and we have to grapple with that.
And I think one of the most telling things to come out of The 1619 Project is the vehemence of opposition against it, especially from academic historians, who kind of made the ridiculous argument that journalists didn't have the right to tell us or to do the work of thinking about the past.
That doesn't make any sense. I mean, these are historians who are teaching undergrads every day, presumably going into these classrooms and encouraging young teenagers to think about the past and to do business with it. I think that the other thing that comes to mind is that, I mean, these were titans in the field, right? Canonical writers of American history that I read as an undergrad and as a graduate student in history who were coming out against Nikole Hannah-Jones and others in The New York Times.
And I think part of what I found so peculiar about their opposition was it seemed like they were saying that they knew the facts, that there were factual errors with The 1619 Project, and that they had already rendered a final narrative that could not be assailed.
And I think what The 1619 Project was doing, my reading of it, I don't think it's perfect, I don't think any historian thinks that any manuscript that they put out in the world is a perfect and complete narrative. And I think what they were doing was participating in historiography, that beautiful word, which basically means the science or the study of writings about history. And what they were saying is, hey, there's more to be written. There's more to be said. And what we are offering is one provisional word or a few provisional words in the midst of an ongoing conversation.
And the critics of The 1619 Project seem to be saying, to me anyway, we've already rendered a final word. And anything that deviates from that narrative is heresy. And that just seemed like a very un-historian thing to do in the face of some really provocative and powerful invitations to remember a much messier past.
AF: Right? Because the question so often is, how can we inspire the imagination of the people of this nation to reimagine their history, right? How can we create the conditions that would allow some of these juggernauts of myth that have been, I think what Baldwin, just to go back to Baldwin, would say, are in our way. And in making progress as a nation and creating the conditions that we seem to say we want, equality and justice.
So what fascinated me about The 1619 Project was that she was actually finding a way to change the story and at least poke a hole in it so that it could be retold. And I just found that as a, you know, as a layperson sitting on the sidelines, but always thinking about the relationship between myth and history, fascinating.
PC: Yeah, and there was a spaciousness about the work that seemed to say, hey, we are doing the work of revisiting some of these really important questions and some of these bedrock assumptions, and we're coming to different conclusions. But we're doing this in real time and we are having conversations, really probing and deep and provocative conversations with each other and with ourselves. There was a, kind of, an invitational quality to it that said others can join in this work as well. And I think it was inspiring. For a moment in time, it seemed like young people were being invited to think in fresh ways about the past.
And there was a sense in which the authority figures basically clamped down and said, this is not real history. Which seemed to me even today to be a real shame in a lost opportunity. And there's probably ways that we can, I mean, I know there are ways that people are continuing that work and I am, in my own work, inspired by that vision of trying to retrieve a more faithful understanding of the past. Again, we're not never going to be able to do it fully or perfectly, but that the work never ends and there's always opportunities to learn more.
AF: And it seems to be that your work is rooted in the belief that that matters. That if we tell a better story, if we tell a more faithful story, that is somehow going to, to what? Transform us, influence us, create better conditions? What would you say is the, is the purpose or meaning behind that work?
PC: I think at the very least, more honest and humble and sober about our understanding of the past might lead us to become more virtuous, perhaps? I think at the very least we need some ground clearing exercises because there are so many unhelpful myths. Not all myths are unhelpful, but so many of the myths that we carry around with us cut off conversation and we have a hard time, like so many people I think are asking today, why is it that American evangelicalism is so deeply mired in racism in America? And some people would dismiss or reject that premise outright and others would see so much salient there and wonder.
And I think we're seeing some really good efforts by historians to look back over the course of the 20th century, the 19th century and the 18th century. And I believe as–of course I'm gonna say this ‘cause my area is 18th century American religious history–I think you have to go back.
You know, George Marsden famously quipped at one time that an evangelical is someone who likes Billy Graham. Well, I think an Evangelical is someone who likes George Whitfield. And we have to go back to the 18th century and we have to understand how it is that from the very beginning of the origins of early evangelicalism, there was this deep entanglement in the project of empire building, in the project of enslaving other human beings. And that was deeply wrapped up into the building of a new religious movement, as well as the building of a new nation.
And so I think unless we go back to the very beginnings and understand the foundations and the ways in which foundations themselves were compromised and corrupted, we're never going to have the full picture. So it seems to me it's a necessary condition for doing the kind of racial justice work that many of us aspire to do today.
AF: I really appreciated the way that you name these intersections and interrelationships, and I look forward to continuing to read your work and spread the word about what it is that you're up to.
PC: Thank you so much, Amy. I really appreciated your questions and enjoyed the conversation.
AF: Thank you, listeners, for joining us today for this episode of In Search Of. If you have ideas of scholars, projects, perspectives that you'd like to hear on this podcast, please let me know. You can email me at insearchof@christiancentury.org.
Also, go to our website christiancentury.org/insearchof to sign up for our newsletter and connect with us. Please follow this podcast and rate it on your favorite podcast app. This has been a production of The Christian Century, a progressive, thoughtful, independent magazine for today. We'll see you next week. Until then, happy searching.