Enduring Violence in America

"Rioters outside the US Capitol building holding 'Make America Great Again' flags" by Tyler Member

The Institute is pleased to announce the 26th volume in our Occasional Papers series. Enduring Violence in America: Two Essays by Professor Theodore Louis Trost (Nominated Fellow 2021-22) examines the events of January 6, 2021 in Washington DC alongside the Beatles' White Album of 1968 as ways of exploring violence - gun violence in particular - as it appears in the USA.

The first essay, Epiphany at the Capitol: Fight Songs for the Insurrection, offers an elaboration upon writing I had begun as part of the "Uncivil Religion" digital media project—a collaboration between the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama and The Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of American History under the direction of Michael Altman and Jerome Copulsky. In this piece, I am interested in the claims about Christian identity that seem to be advanced in song by supporters of the "Stop the Steal" campaign. While this event takes place on January 6, the Feast of Epiphany (or the 12th day of Christmas) according to the Christian church year, there seems to be no awareness of this holy day's stature among the Christians who have sojourned from afar to gather together in the nation's capital. The inference of this disregard may itself suggest a kind of epiphany.

The second essay, Notes on The Beatles' 'White Album' in the Year 2022, considers the historical context and literary content of certain tunes from the Beatles' 1968 album that speak to the continuing problem of violence in America over half a century later. A surprising admixture of religion and gunplay, it is argued, appears in these compositions. This essay arose in relation to the insurrection in Washington in January 2021, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and the series of mass shootings that were occurring across America during the spring and summer of 2022.

The book can be downloaded as a PDF here, or free copies may be requested from IASH by contacting iash@ed.ac.uk.

Theodore Trost is Professor of Religious Studies with a secondary appointment in New College at the University of Alabama.  His interdisciplinary research interests include American religious history, ecumenism, religion in popular culture, songwriting, and biblical narrative. He is the author of Douglas Horton and the Ecumenical Impulse in American Religious History (Harvard, 2002); editor of The African Diaspora and the Study of Religion (Palgrave, 2007); and coeditor of Teaching African American Religions (Oxford, 2005); The Development of the Church: The Principle of Protestantism and Other Historical Writings of Philip Schaff (Wipf and Stock, 2017); and Love Across the Atlantic: US-UK Romance in Popular Culture (Edinburgh, 2020), to which he also contributed the chapter '"Imagine There's No Countries": John Lennon's Politics of Love.'  Additional recent writings include the book chapter 'Randy Newman's Satirical Vision and the Myth of America' (2019) and the article 'Theo-political Discourse and Rock 'n' Roll in the Reagan Era' (2018).