At the WH conference on American history today, Allen Guelzo warns against the imagined dangers of the @ZinnEdProject. It’s a glimpse into what Trump & Co are doing w/ the culture wars, but I wanted to share b/c Guelzo was my college professor...
At the Christian liberal arts school I chose b/c they were publicly committed to faith, reason & social justice, a wealthy donor who’d worked in the Reagan administration endowed an honors college. Guelzo was its 1st dean. We read classics & the neocons of the 90s.
In that context, we learned to talk about reactionary conservatism as the faithful practice of the Christian life of the mind. Those conversations were always dismissive of the very people Christ blessed—the poor & rejected.
Howard Zinn, for those who don’t know, was a professor in Atlanta, GA when his Black students who’d almost all grown up in the church started sitting in at lunch counters & became the foot soldiers of the civil rights movement.
Zinn wrote about them as The New Abolitionists, and began articulating their connection to a long people’s history of social change from the bottom up—you know, like Jesus did it.
The intellectual tradition Guelzo trained me in, I’ve come to understand, was a reaction against the moral vision of those students & Freedom Riders who taught Zinn to see history from below.
Watching Guelzo try to tear down @nhannahjones & the #1619Project has helped me realize that I’ve spent my whole writing career trying to break free from the myths of reactionary religious frameworks that were designed to defend the status quo & push back vs the civil rights mvmt
I wrote #RevolutionOfValues b/c I realized that Trumpism could have never happened if so many white Christian had not been willing to accept the suppression of Black Christian’s wisdom re: people’s history. amazon.com/Revolution-Val…
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