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According to Kenneth Burke, every idea houses its opposite. "Heresies and orthodoxies will always be changing places," he imagined, "but whatever the minority view happens to be at any given time, one must consider it as 'counter.'" In other words, every tradition contains its own critique. Ideas are always in dialogue, bridging gaps that we may not have known existed until the bridges were built. And alongside those bridges are other implied ways to transfer and create meaning. To foreground that pendulum and address our contemporary political climate, White Nationalism and Faith: Statements and Counter-Statements on American Identity includes American texts which wield religious arguments in order to affirm or dismantle white supremacy. William Jennings Bryan, Billy Sunday, and Bob Jones as well as Barack Obama, Phil Snider, and Mitch Landrieu are just a few of the voices in dialogue. This anthology is designed for the upper-level undergraduate or master's student so that they can explore how American rhetors since the Civil War have constituted their white nationalism through religious rhetoric. With this anthology of statements and their contemporaneous counter-statements, students of public address can craft and polish the same serious but comedic lens as Kenneth Burke imagined in the twentieth century.
List of contents
Foreword - Acknowledgments - "When in Rome, Do as the Greeks!": Statements and Counter-Statements - Reconstructing America's Religious Rhetoric - Henry Grady: "The South and Her Problems" - John Roach Straton: "Saving America That the World Might Be Saved" - Maintaining America's White Piety - Billy Sunday: "The Theater, the Cards and the Dance" - Andrew West: "Why Princeton Did Not Ask Billy Sunday" - Bob Jones, Sr.: "Modern Woman" - Naming America's White Supremacy - Andrew Cobb Erwin: "I Come from Georgia!" - William Jennings Bryan: "Jesus Is More Needed" - Separating within American Itself - William Ward Ayer: "Evangelical Christianity Endangered by Its Fragmentized Condition" - E.Earle Ellis: "Segregation and the Kingdom of God" - Billy James Hargis: "The Cross and the Sickle" - James Forman: "Black Manifesto" - Carl McIntire: "Christian Manifesto" - Redeeming America from Its Original Sin - Terry Rude: "Southern Manhood" - Phil Snider: "The Right Side of History" - Barack Obama: "Eulogy for State Senator and Pastor Clementa Pinckney" - Mitch Landrieu: "On Removing Confederate Statues" - Confessing America's Sin of White Nationalism - James Williams: "Ending Racial Segregation in the Church".
About the author
Camille Kaminski Lewis is Visiting Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Furman University. She holds a Ph.D. from Indiana University in Rhetorical Studies and is the author of Romancing the Difference: Kenneth Burke, Bob Jones University, and the Rhetoric of Religious Fundamentalism.
Summary
This anthology compiles a selection of American texts that wield religious arguments in order to affirm or dismantle white supremacy. William Jennings Bryan, Billy Sunday, and Bob Jones as well as Barack Obama, Phil Snider, and Mitch Landrieu are just a few of the voices in dialogue.
