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Hello everybody, and welcome to new books and Catholic Studies, a podcast channel on the new books network. This channel and episode were created in collaboration with the American Catholic Historical Association, a conference of scholars, archivists, and teachers of Catholic Studies. My name is Allison Isador, and I'm a host of the channel. Today we'll be talking to Dr.
Lauren Horn Griffin, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at LSU, and the author of Fabricating Founders in Early Modern England, History, Rhetoric, and the Origins of Christianity, published by Brill in September 2023. This book argues that in order to understand nationalism, we need a clear understanding of the types of culture, myths, symbols, and traditions that legitimate them. Mists of origins and elections, memories of a greater and pure past, and narratives of persecution and mission are required for the production and maintenance of powerful national sentiments. Through an investigation of how early modern Catholics and Protestants re-imagined, reinterpreted, and rewrote the lives of the founder Saints, who spread Christianity in England, this book offers a theoretical framework for the study of originatives, analyzing the discursive construction of time and place, the invocation of forces beyond the human to naturalize and authorize, and the role of visual and ritual culture in fabricating the past.
This book provides a case study for how to approach claims about founding figures. Warren, welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Yeah, well, before we get started diving into your book, I was wondering if you could tell us a bit about yourself.
Some of our listeners might recognize you because you're also a host for new books and Catholic studies as well. Yeah, that's right. So I am a professor of religious studies at Louisiana State University, LSU, where I teach and research about religion and politics as well as religion, media, and technology. So sort of like overall, I'm interested in how shifts in media make new identities possible, how we imagine religious versus spatial, also like national, regional, local identities, and how we imagine ourselves.
And most of my examples come from Catholic communities. Yeah, and we'll get more into that as we talk about your chapters too. But before really diving into the nitty gritty of the book, how did you come about this project? Was there anything that inspired you to write it?
Like what was up? Yeah, so the book is based on my dissertation, which I completed at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2016. So I had been long interested in the history of Christianity and why it fragmented the way it did. Now, I would no longer even employ that type of framework or asset type of question, but back then I did.
And of course, given that my experience, you know, in the world I'd been surrounded by Christianity in the US, I sort of kept going back further and further in time to try to get at like how denominations were formed and how national churches emerged. And so I ended up in the early modern period looking at this sort of relationship between Christianity and the emerging conceptions of national identity in this period. So when I wrote the dissertation, I just sort of arbitrarily used early modern retellings of the arrival of Christianity to just sort of narrow down this broad topic of like how English Catholics were reimagining the past. And I just happened to focus on that very early past.
But then after I finished the dissertation when I was working on the book manuscript, I became much more interested in the social theory aspects of this concept of origins and the original church in England and how and why. Imagining like a pure original of something is such a useful tool for identity formation. So this ended up being a lot more about how origin narratives, particularly the founding figures that often anchor them, function as like really uniquely powerful tools for the cultural production of national identity. Yeah, and I think that's such a great launching point into talking about origin narratives.
You know, you state, you know, the book is dealing with questions of intellectual history on the rise of historical criticism, epistemological uncertainty and concepts of time. And so I was wondering why were these things so important to say engage with one looking at origin narratives? Yeah, so the great thing about using this particular origin story, that is the arrival or beginning of Christianity in England as my object of study is that it opened up a whole different, a whole bunch of different types of questions from a variety of fields. So like focusing on how English Christian origins function allow me to look at how they became, you know, of course, the ingredient in national identification, but also in drug and these other early modern debates where they reworked these origin myths for their purpose in the present.
So they had to answer questions about say historical knowledge, what's reliable history, what medieval sources are we allowed to use and involve questions about like certainty? Like what can we know and how do we know it? It evolved questions about like where God is and how much he interacts in human affairs and how much he guides them versus how much he kind of stays more transcendent. So the stories that were told in the text were also told through like images, monuments, place names, the liturgy sprinkled throughout the realm of the everyday.
So it wasn't just sort of intellectual text, but also sort of whole resources. We would be able to cultural resources. So I got to engage with a variety of different types of sources and questions in kind of pursuing this deep dive on early modern reimagining of Christian origins. Yeah, and that's something I really liked about your book in that these debates about like origin and tradition and like place and space.
We see them even today within say arguments about nationalism. And I think that is something really key in your book is that yes, it's talking about this very distant past, but it's so applicable to the present. Yeah, for sure. I both open and close the book with sort of a little anecdote about my home state of Oklahoma and the use of or the there was a bill for the Tin Command, one of those Tin Command monuments, you know, that this is a comment to a lot of states like to sort of keep those on the capital one.
And so I sort of unpack how both the bill and how it was drafted in a language, it uses but also sort of the cultural, the symbol of that monument and like how people read it when it was removed, how people reacted to that. So like the absence of the monument. So just sort of a way to set up this broader discussion so that maybe the book won't just be interesting for people who are interested in early modern England, but people who are yeah, more interested in these questions perhaps now. Yeah, I especially was attracted to, you know, this idea of materiality and space, you know, I don't think it's discussed nearly enough that, you know, the locations and identities of location and spaces have such a deep connection to origin.
You're not just using say text to discuss this early modern English period in terms of say the Catholics identity. Rather, you're highlighting the fluid, constructed and heterogeneous nature of say confession and national identity. Can you tell our listeners more about these key things to the confessional and national identity for these Catholics? Yeah, so oftentimes fields outside of religious studies or even within really study, we see arguments where scholars sort of take quote unquote religion out of this complex social equation and control for it like it's an independent variable.
So they might argue like, oh, ex group of people behave this way because of their religion or similarly will make broad claims about people based on like national identity, like Americans are obnoxious abroad or something like that. So the book I wanted to sort of keep a constantly fluid aspect of identification front and center. There is no early modern English Catholicism. So as the book shows, English Catholics differed on everything from their views on history to their political goals, you know, English farmers in the countryside had very different ideas and experiences than English Catholic precepts led to the continent, for example, English Catholics during the early days of Henry separation were responding to very different circumstances than Elizabethan Catholics to just a few decades later.
So regarding identity at this time, and all the time, the way people sort of restorically construct themselves as English people emerged out of particular sort of historical political social conditions. And so it was just static. And also I just wanted to write a book like I said, I could speak to people who were maybe not just interested in early moderning in particular, but in these broader questions about how we construct and imagine ideas of deep past for purposes of identity in the present. Yeah.
And like, I think we also see this a lot when it comes to say discussions of religious nationalism too, right? You mentioned, you know, Americans are not like the trope of American start and travel, you know, and whatnot. But like, there's also the redundancy as you argue of using the term religious national. How is this the use of that term in say early modern periods similar or different to how we're using it today?
Yeah. So by using the provocative statement that it was, you know, an acronym stick and redundant, I wanted to communicate that like all national identities have cultural resources that support that, right? So the cultural resources of nationalism are that are usually the things that we colloquially identify as clinical religious things like myths of origin and election memories of a golden age narratives of persecution. And this is a period also before the enlightenment before ideas like the separation of church and state before the word, you know, secular was deployed in the way it often is now.
So calling this quote religious nationalism just really doesn't make sense, right? And similarly, even now we can ask what scholars mean when they highlight the religious part of religious nationalism, right? So what they're doing when they say that is they're pointing out they're they're coding the cultural resources for a particular nationalistic expression as religious, right? Which brings up interesting questions for what exactly that scholar is trying to emphasize, right?
How am I how might maybe pointing out how the cultural resources of nationalism might be religious? How might that charge because usually an accusation, right? How might that charge sanitize other cultural resources for national identification that are also wrapped up in ethnic or racial, uh, this horses? How might calling something religious nationalism mask the way he's that and, you know, as my book argues and shows in detail that the cultural resources for national identity have always been what we would colloquially call religious.
So the book really shows that because of confessionalization in Europe in this period, folks had to articulate their national sentiments in Christian terms. And this goes on right to influence other articulations of national sentiments, particularly in the US. Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, I can't talk enough about like the materiality because I'm like materialist material girl, but it's I think a really key factor. I mean, you have a whole chapter dedicated to this idea of materiality in connection to these founding figures. Um, so how, how did these founding figures and the early modern historians specifically use the spatial spatiality, uh, materiality to anchor themselves and their religious identities? Yeah.
So using the founding figures as sort of, um, points of the object of study allowed me to think about how constructing origins deals with space as much as it does the conceptions of time. So like I asked an inch after two of the book, I asked like, how are places or conceptions of physical spaces naturalized? Like how do we come to just naturally, um, uh, assume we know what, what, uh, England means or the US means or whatever? So how are like boundaries and scale kind of produced in these social processes?
How does constructing a setting, right? A place involved conceptions of ethnicity, language and confessional identity. Uh, so in focusing on how early modern folks used founding figures to conceptualize England as space, I was able to analyze kind of like discursive constructions of confessional identity and ethnicity. So for example, some writers, both Catholic and Protestant drew on broader conceptions of Britain.
So they use the term Britain instead of England, right? And but they were doing so in service, uh, I argue at least, it's a distinctly English national sentiment. Uh, were really Anglo centric. Uh, and they chose not to sort of make common cause with other, um, ideas of say, Welsh or Irish kind of Celtic identities.
They really focused on that, this sort of Anglo, um, inheritance, right? Uh, they're, they're Anglo-Saxon as opposed to Britain or Celtic, uh, roots, right? So the ways in which they produced their ideas about space and boundaries and sort of, uh, constructing that, that specific English nation as far as the space really was bound up with all these other issues of language, ethnicity and, and confessional identity. Yeah.
And I think that goes to your point that, you know, like origin stories are not this like static thing. I think often when we're talking about say origins are when the public sphere, like K through tell, well, we're talking like the founding of a country, right? It's very much seen as the static thing, this black and white thing when that's not necessarily true. It's more of a gray or, um, it's just more complicated than that.
And so I was wondering if you can tell the listeners more about this, um, non-static or as you argue that, um, it's more of a dynamic situational and relational to the groups itself. Can you talk more about that? Yeah. For sure.
I like how you, when you were talking about like K12 context and stuff because, um, also often when I was working on this honestly, it's, you know, in English context, so much I thought about an American context and how, how we are right, how like public schools do socialize us using these very origin areas, right? And how we sort of reenact them at school. I know that in my home state of Oklahoma, we reenacted the founding of Oklahoma, which was what happened with a land run. So like they moved indigenous folks in a territory off to the margins and opened it up where like white settlers and we reenact that.
And I think a lot of schools they still do like reenacted that as kids, right? And sort of re-told the story of like brave, uh, pioneers on the frontier, like running, like going out and cleaning that land, like we put little stakes. So like things like that, or maybe how like on Thanksgiving, you would dress up perhaps as a Puritan or something, a pilgrim. I mean, um, so, uh, the ways in which these stories, and if you look in like textbooks and stuff, we can probably go back to like 1950 and look at those textbooks and then look at a textbook today and compare sort of like how those have changed and how those changes really reflect what's going on now.
Right. So this idea of not being static, meaning we don't tell the same story that we told in the 1950s or some kids in Oklahoma no longer reenact that land run, right? Because we've changed on like what we value and that story doesn't sound maybe as, as good as it once did to some, right? So, um, so the story isn't the same.
It's like, you know, told quite differently. So in my book, so they like to give a little bit of context, some scholars have argued that sort of the theological context amongst Protestants shaped English political culture and led to the sort of distinct national identity, this Protestant England, right? So I mean, of course, English national identity, like all identities was, was blue. And so in the book, I hope to highlight that it was the debates themselves, right?
Having to produce and defend myths of Christian origin over and over that sort of comprised of that process of national identification. So in other words, I wanted to show that it wasn't a particular sort of Protestant or Catholic idea that produced and shaped English national consciousness, but rather than just the act of having to rearticulate the arrival of Christianity and particularly its founding figures served as a key driver for this ongoing production of England, right? At English national sentiment itself, right? And that's something that Catholics just as much as reformers participated in and contribute to.
So more broadly, right? This English example has broader implications for our understanding of the nationals that would later develop, sort of arguing that it wasn't like, it wasn't the rhetorical tropes, right, that created this sort of political reality, but rather the rhetorical tropes emerged out of particular historical, political and social conditions. So to bring it back, we'll circle to our little, to our, you know, US example, even though we might debate, you know, say the founding fathers or, you know, America's origin story and we have sort of dueling arguments like the 1619 project versus, you know, other projects. What it does though, what we can probably all agree that it, one function of that is that it keeps the US and the United States as the point of departure, right?
It keeps that national identity at the fore. And when we say, when we say, who do we want to be, who do we want to be, we're continuing to imagine ourselves as Americans, right? And as, you know, citizens of the United States. So it keeps our, it keeps our, you know, producing ourselves as citizens of a particular nation with particular boundaries.
regardless of like the character you want for it. So that was like one thing I wanted to argue in the book that like England emerged because of having to arch, to debate it, right. And even though the idea that has changed over time, by keeping as our point of departure, it continues to be a really, uh, formative, um, identity for so many. Yeah, I, when you're talking about say like in the American context, especially your the textbook example, I was just thinking about like, in Florida, right?
How, they're now, you know, there are so many changes going through the K-12 system there, especially when it comes to how, we talk about certain histories. Something big is just arrived at Fanduil Casino. Explore how you can level up your playing experience. Literally, a world of fun awaits.
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And so I got it, I'm so fascinated in this, the way certain histories, right? Your argument is like, England emerges out of this because of the defense of certain identities and nationalities, right? And so it's like, depending on who's in the driver's seat of writing that history, it depends on how we're really remembering that history and narrative. Yeah, absolutely.
And right now, I get to go back to your earlier question about sort of material culture. Like you said, not only how is this playing out maybe in intellectual circles, say amongst professional historians, or even say journalists, but also in places like textbook production, or even more materially, like through statues. Right now, we're having, over the last 10 years, we've had huge debates over monuments, and how we memorialize our past, right? And so thinking about what stories do we wanna tell?
Who's centered, and then how do they literalize our landscape, right? How does that fact that there's a US flag all over the place, you know, continue to reinforce ourselves as citizens of the US, right? So just thinking about what letters are the landscape, and how it tells those stories, outplace names, right? So there's also like changing of names of high schools or streets, right?
So I unpack all of that in chapter four of the book, an English context, we look at how sort of liturgical plays, things like town names, little things like that, that just sort of maybe aren't even seen as like super special or important, but just seep into the everyday, that just sort of tell a story, maybe not a coherent narrative, but continue to communicate ideas about the past, right? That people make different uses of in the present, for sure. So for my work, I look at Catholics and the Civil Rights Movement, right? But in doing that, you know, I look at the local and the national, and then I'm trying to pull out more and do global, but like, I think you also highlight this within the book as well, this, you know, national, or I should say local, national, and then you're applying it more globally by bringing US examples in as well.
And so I was wondering, you talk more about say the local versus national. Yeah, so within sort of the scholarship on the early modern period, or early modern England in particular, there's sort of this debate around when local identity or regional identity became less important and when national identity came to the fore, right? And so they're always not always, they're often pitted like as competition to each other. And what the blog book tries to show is, especially in chapter four, is that with the work of antiquarians, sort of traveling around and noting what they're seeing, what they're finding, trying to sort of capture what's going on in that area, the resources in that area, especially maybe for some of these older monastic properties are destroyed or taken away.
So they're trying to sort of capture what's in these materials regionally. I argue that regional and national identity don't need to be seen as in competition. In fact, a strong regional identity, like they had, especially in the North, can be really, can reinforce a national identity. So similar to maybe how we might argue in US context, that having strong Southern pride, for example, because the South seems to imagine itself to having unique identity.
This is in no way unpatriotic, right? Like they, in fact, a lot of times this is retortically marshaled into support ideas and national identity and patriotism. So that's one of the arguments is that just because we might have a strong local regional sort of pie, it doesn't necessarily mean we all have to debate when this gave way to national sentiment, right? They can, they can and I argue do totally work hand in hand.
So when those, when those inter-crayons traveled to those regions, maybe there was their home region and they felt really connected to that regional identity. It didn't mean that they didn't have national sentiment or imagine England as space or anything like that. In fact, I say it reinforced it. So that's one argument that the book makes as well.
Yeah, well, Lauren, I've only got one question one. So I was wondering, are you currently working on new projects? Are there any lingering questions remaining from this book in particular that you're playing on pursuing or maybe going in a new direction? I know at the top of the interview, you mentioned that this comes out of a dissertation.
So there are definitely some things you would maybe go and do differently now. Yeah, for sure. So I have such a broad range of interests, but I have kind of state focused on how tradition is produced. So that's still sort of a lingering question for me, right?
How this idea of tradition and pure origins are produced. So my current program examines how tradition is produced in a computationally rich world of a material and technological elements. So how new identities are made possible by digital media, including a whole mess of like, you know, algorithm aesthetic and choice. So I'm currently working on a book, a manuscript I'm calling Trads or hashtag Trads.
I don't know if I want to put the hashtag there. Cold and Catholic communities, national identities and the production of tradition in an age of digital hyper-connectivity. So in fabricating founders, right, as we discussed, I investigated how early modern Catholics, we wrote the story of the arrival of Christianity in order to negotiate national and religious identities, focusing on how shifts in media like the printing press and the rise of antiquarianism shaped how tradition was manufactured and towards social ends. So after I finished fabricating founders, I wrote an article about US Catholics using images of medieval and early modern Europe on Twitter in particular to the manufacturer ideas of Western civilization, right, for purposes in the present.
So in that article, I was asking the same questions about the production of national identity and employing the same sort of media analysis as I did in that first book, but I had accidentally sort of changed my focus. I'd actually become an Americanist and a scholar of sort of digital hyper-connectivity. So I definitely couldn't be pursuing sort of the new directions in my teaching and research without the historical context and the theoretical framework that founding fathers provided. I'm also sort of starting to engage in questions surrounding this idea of Christian nationalism and constructions of religious nationalism, because so many people, as I've been talking about fabricating founders and as I continue to talk about traditionalist Catholics and how they produce tradition online, people really want me to engage with this question of Christian nationalists.
And sometimes interview rules will just call them Christian nationalists or their own or they'll ask me if I consider them Christian nationalists, right? So sort of against my will, I've had to engage in this, in these debates around like Christian nationalism and what it is and who is one and all of that kind of thing. So it's been sort of exciting though to reflect on, to have that deep history of this history, right, of fabricating counters provided, which I did indeed argue that like, hey, because of confessionalization, the cultural resources of nationalism had to be, you know, had to be Christian, had to be articulated in specifically Christian terms. So I can always point back to that.
But it also has made me more like, think in a more nuanced way about this very question, like what do we mean when we say religious nationalism? How is the term Christian nationalism functioning for scholars now, right? So I hope the book and my work, I have a few smaller pieces that hopefully are going to address that question, but I guess I hope my work in general, I'm not trying to police the term or say like people can't use it or whatever, but I hope that it contributes to discussions of like, what happens when we do use the term, right? What do people mean when they use it?
How does it function in scholarship, right? Christian nationalism is in particular just because that's really, you know, in use in heavy use right now amongst scholars of American religions, but also this idea of religious nationalism more broadly, right? But like I said, it's often talked about, it's used as an accusation, like well, this is religious nationalism. And obviously the critiques often come from places where people are critiquing the ways in which, you know, using religious resources for a national identity is tied up with a whole bunch of ideas about race and ideas about ethnicity and ideas, you know, ideas that maybe are gendered, right, that are embedded in sort of patriarchal notions of authority and things like that, which is absolutely true.
But again, I'm hoping my work says, well, number one, how is this not new? And not only not new, but kind of how it had to be, right? At least emerging out of the early modern period, if we talk about nationalism that way. And then how do we, how does it mask the ways in which all the other cultural resources do this, right?
So for example, I wrote a piece on like this piece here that I had written about how US Catholics were using images of medieval and other women are, you know, you want to hear it from me, a factor of Western civilization, right? So like how are they used to create broader identities than national ones, more about Western civilization, which kind of draws on a host national, more broader, civilizational sort of identity? How does it, how do people use say, Greco-Roman ideas, right? The idea of the Roman Empire, which we might not consider overtly religious.
How do people use ancient Rome as sort of a, to articulate very racialized ideas of national identity, right? So it doesn't just have to be Christian. Obviously, people can use lots of different resources to do this. So kind of reflecting more on the nuances is something I'm definitely interested in.
And I hope that this book in the next one kind of speak to. Well, I think this book definitely does that. And I can't wait to read the next book. I'm very excited to see where to go with that.
But Warren, thanks for joining us and talking. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Yeah, this has been New Books in Catholic Studies, a New Book Network podcast.