Dr. Peter Manseau is a curator of American religious history at the Smithsonian and the author of ten books. He started #capitolsiegereligion soon after the January 6 insurrection in order to facilitate a crowdsourced collection of religious symbols and imagery from the siege. He talks to Brad about the Christian (and non-Christian) symbolism among the participants, the ways religious media and rhetoric fostered the resentment and anger that fueled the riot, and the examples from American religious history that can help us make sense of what happened and think about what's next. What's clear from this conversation is that religion was everywhere on 1/6 and we have to reckon with that in order to move forward.
Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus episodes, ad-free listening, access to the entire 500-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC
Order Brad's new book: https://www.amazon.com/Preparing-War-Extremist-Christian-Nationalism/dp/1506482163
SWAJ Apparel is here! https://straight-white-american-jesus.creator-spring.com/listing/not-today-uncle-ron
To Donate:
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/BradleyOnishi
Venmo: @straightwhitejc
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
AXIS MUNDY AXIS MUNDY Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
And I'm joined today by Dr. Peter Manso, who's the Lilly Endowment Curator of American Religious History at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.
Dr. Manseau is the author of 10 books, including the memoir Vows, the novel Songs for the Butcher's Daughter, the travelogue Rag and Bone, the retelling of America's diverse spiritual formation in One Nation Under Gods, a narrative history called The Apparitionists, and most recently, the Jefferson Bible, a biography.
He's a founding editor of KillingtheBuddha.com and co-author with Jeff Charlotte of Killing the Buddha, A Heretic's Bible.
He received his doctorate in religion from Georgetown and lives near DC.
First of all, Peter, thank you for joining me.
It's a pleasure.
Oh, it's my great honor.
Thanks for having me.
Well, I wanted to have you on because you, in the wake of the January 6th insurrection, you had the sort of intuition to start a hashtag that I have found incredibly important for understanding what happened since then, and that is at Capital Siege Religion.
And so I want to ask you some questions about that.
I want to sort of jump in there.
Um, and just sort of see what you found.
Um, it is astounding how much religion, uh, quote unquote is, uh, to be found in the artifacts from the Capitol siege.
And so I guess my very first question is just what prompted you to start this, this project?
Um, and how has it proceeded, you know, since you have.
Well, I, um, like a lot of people, I was watching it unfold live.
Um, I, I sort of trying to, To find the best way to learn quickly what was happening at the Capitol, I stumbled onto one of the C-SPAN live streams, and I was watching the live stream in the Statuary Hall, which, when I started watching it, was empty, but I found it so haunting that you could hear the crowd outside the building.
And just as I was watching, people started to enter the hall, and so it was as if I was in the room and saw people suddenly breaking through.
At the time, I did not immediately notice Any particular religious symbols from these the people who were first the first ones into the building?
It was not until the following weekend when all the photos and all the videos were beginning to find their way online That I started to notice this which of course everyone else did I wasn't noticing anything that everyone else wasn't wasn't seeing and it was interesting to me just how that unfolded because I've been And a couple times I've been called an anti-Christian bigot on Twitter for noting the prevalence of Christian symbols among the insurrectionists.
And so I want to note that I was actually, I had brought my daughter to a confirmation event.
She was in a confirmation class for the Presbyterian Church that we attend here in Annapolis, Maryland.
And as I was wiling away the time in the car, I was watching all these images and realizing This is important.
As much as the event itself was something that immediately was obvious it needed to be documented, the religious element, the religious dimension, which was becoming to seem so pervasive as I was watching The images and then the videos, it occurred to me that this really has to be documented because it's a part of it that could be easy to miss.
And in fact, in the days that followed the attack, I read some really compelling accounts of what had happened that did not really treat the religious dimension of it at all.
And it was astonishing to me that you could choose to edit that out.
And that becomes the first draft of the history that would be remembered.
So as a way of working against that, I thought, how can we gather these materials together so that everyone could start to look at them and compare them to each other?
And so the hashtag was the obvious choice, and Capital C's Religion is what I chose to call it.
You have been an observer of American religions, American religious history from all angles, as a writer, as a scholar, as a researcher, as a curator.
Were you shocked by the just overwhelming presence of religious imagery and symbols at the insurrection?
If I was, I shouldn't have been.
I think that it's, as I said, when I first saw the people first through the building, they weren't there.
And so, as you got a broader sense of what was happening outside the building, the full portrait, began to make more sense.
And I want to add, because you did mention my work as a curator at the National Museum of American History, I want to add that this is a fully crowdsourced effort.
This is not an official collecting effort of the Smithsonian Institution.
My colleagues and I are, of course, collecting physical objects from the Capitol attack, including protest signs and those types of materials.
But the complications of collecting digital materials are such that it is really better to be an informal crowd-sourced affair, and that's what Capital C's religion has become.
Thanks for listening to this free preview of our Swadge episode.
In order to get access to the full episode and so much more, become a Straight White American Jesus Premium Subscriber by clicking the link in the show notes.
It'll take you like two clicks, I promise.
In addition to getting access to this episode, you'll have access to the entire Swadge archive, over 550 episodes.
You'll also get an extra episode every month, ad-free listening, Discord access, and so much more.
All that for less than six bucks a month, and it helps us keep our flag up and continue to safeguard democracy from religious nationalism, extremism, and rising authoritarianism.
