Agents of God: Boundaries and Authority in Muslim and Christian Schools, by JEFFREY GUHIN

Scott-Baumann, Alison

doi:10.1093/socrel/srab025

Cited by 4 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 1 publication

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“…Though the essentially Christian character of American political institutions remains the subject of intense debate, both religious and patriotic education were historically quite common in public schools (Pew Research Center 2019). Schools were the venues not only of intellectual or technical training, but the formation of virtuous citizens (Guhin 2020). Despite the rising ethos of a “Christian nation” identity following World War II (which saw the United States add “under God” to the pledge of allegiance in 1954 and change its official motto to “In God We Trust” in 1956), the 1960s witnessed significant Supreme Court decisions that would spark long‐standing controversy over religion in public education (Kruse 2015).…”

Section: Culture Wars and The Emerging Patriotic Education Movementmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Public education has long been both a source and a site of cultural contention in the United States (Guhin 2020; Hawkins 2021; LaHaye 1983). Following Supreme Court decisions in the 1960s that rendered mandatory Bible reading and prayer unconstitutional, leaders on the Christian Right, convinced that biblical principles had always been the key to America's prosperity, lamented the “removal of God” from the public schools (Falwell 1980; LaHaye 1983).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Controlling the Past to Control the Future: Christian Nationalism and Mandatory Patriotic Education in Public Schools

Perry

Davis

Grubbs

2023

Scientific Study of Religion

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Recent debates about whether educators should teach America's racist history have sparked activism and legislation to ensure students are taught American history in such a way that promotes “patriotism,” amplifying cherished national myths, emphasizing American exceptionalism, and erasing negative historical facts. Building on insights from both social dominance theory and Christian nationalism research, we propose Christian nationalism combines legitimizing myths that whitewash America's past with authoritarian impulses and thus seeks to enforce “patriotic” content in public school classrooms. We also theorize this connection varies across racial, partisan, and ideological identities. Data from a nationally‐representative survey of Americans affirm Christian nationalism is by far the leading predictor Americans believe “We should require public school teachers to teach history in a way that promotes patriotism.” This association is consistent across race (possibly due to divergent meanings of both “Christian nationalism” and “patriotism” across groups), but varies by partisanship and ideological identity for whites. Specifically, Christian nationalism brings whites who identify with the ideological and political left into complete alignment with their conservative counterparts who are already more likely to support mandatory patriotic education. Our findings provide critical context for ongoing battles over public‐school curricula and education's role in perpetuating social privilege.

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Section: Culture Wars and The Emerging Patriotic Education Movementmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Controlling the Past to Control the Future: Christian Nationalism and Mandatory Patriotic Education in Public Schools

Perry

Davis

Grubbs

2023

Scientific Study of Religion

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“…Although a significant portion of the scholarship on religion and politics focuses on the political and religious experiences and attitudes of individuals (Jelen 1993), churches and clergy remain central to the study of politics and religion (Wilcox and Larson 2006, Wald, Owen, and Hill 1998). Within any religious tradition, especially those that emphasize “the word” (Guhin 2020), sermons are central platforms to convey issue salience in a religious community, priming congregations to view certain issues as important, framing complex issues within religious terms, and constructing the barriers for appropriate behavior. For all of their importance in the Protestant world, the importance of the pastor and of the sermon remain deeply understudied in the sociology of religion.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

When to Preach About Poverty: How Location, Race, and Ideology Shape White Evangelical Sermons

Guhin

Holman

Coan

et al. 2023

Scientific Study of Religion

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Social scientists have long been interested in how intergroup contact or elite messaging can reduce or eliminate racial biases. To better understand the role of religious elites in these political questions, we show how a church location's income and racial characteristics interact with racial and economic ideologies to shape the political content of sermons. Testing our theories through both quantitative and qualitative analysis of an original data set of more than 102,000 sermons from more than 5200 pastors, we show that contact is only effective as a means of decreasing prejudice to the extent that actors—in our case, pastors—are ideologically capable of reconciling their potential role in economic inequality. White Evangelical pastors rarely preach about issues of poverty or racial justice overall, but the context of the preaching matters. We find that the greater the share of Black population there is in a church community, the less likely White Evangelical pastors are to mention issues of poverty or racial justice, and when they do mention it, they hold to ideological commitments that avoid blaming systems for racialized economic inequality.

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“…Yet there are other, more orthogonal approaches to agency, conversations that move away from disambiguating when people are actually free, or the structured nature of their freedom, whether via "structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures" (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 72) or anything else. In these conversations, the question is not about how people are agentic but rather how things are agentic (Latour, 2005;Verbeek, 2021), often with a parallel focus on how that agency is experienced by people (Guhin, 2020). How and when do we feel as though something else is an agent, and why?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Traces of the Dead, Actions of the Not-Alive: A Prologue to a Theory of Agentification

Guhin

2022

American Behavioral Scientist

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The author describes how sociological and philosophical discussions of agency tend to center questions of how or why people are agentic rather than who or what is agentic. In contrast, the author poses questions about the agency of things, the agency of non-humans, and the agency of dead humans, using three examples of historical traces—Washington’s refusal of a third term, Jenner’s development of the smallpox vaccines, and Smith’s publication of The Wealth of Nations—as historical examples to examine how non-humans and non-living-humans leave traces that can experienced as agentic. The author then analyzes six theories of agency that might provide explanations for these actions (actants, affordances, switchmen, residue, repression, and ghosts) before turning to his earlier work on the concept of “external authorities.”

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Agents of God: Boundaries and Authority in Muslim and Christian Schools, by JEFFREY GUHIN

Cited by 4 publications

References 1 publication

Controlling the Past to Control the Future: Christian Nationalism and Mandatory Patriotic Education in Public Schools

Controlling the Past to Control the Future: Christian Nationalism and Mandatory Patriotic Education in Public Schools

When to Preach About Poverty: How Location, Race, and Ideology Shape White Evangelical Sermons

Traces of the Dead, Actions of the Not-Alive: A Prologue to a Theory of Agentification

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