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Shelley Baranowski WCA 2019 Acceptance Speech Shelley Osmun Baranowski ’68 WCA Award Acceptance Speech Delivered June 1, 2019 My thanks to Jon, Amy, the award committee, my extended family, classmates and friends who made the trek to Aurora for this occasion. Although my husband Ed is not here in the flesh, he is here in spirit cheering us on. I am truly honored to accept this year’s WCA Award. I was blessed with a wonderful education from kindergarten through graduate school, but Wells occupies a special place in that continuum. The college reinforced the enormous value of a liberal arts education, evident in its array of courses and disciplines beyond anything I could then imagine. In fact, I found it difficult to choose a major. I loved history in high school and intended to concentrate on in it when I came to Wells, but my exposure to the academic study of religion in Arthur Bellinzoni’s, Tom Litzenburg’s, and Chalmers McCormick’s classes, and the varied approaches that they offered, opened windows into a rich and complicated dimension of the human experience. I careened back and forth between history and religion until finally settling on the latter. My graduate degrees from Princeton are in religious studies with a concentration in the history of Christianity, but I worked extensively in the history department, and I spent most of my career teaching modern Europe and modern Germany in departments of history. Interdisciplinary interests can indeed transcend disciplinary boundaries. In the seventies when I was a graduate student my primary field seemed curious to some who studied modern Europe, inasmuch as social history predominated in history departments and Europe was presumed to have been secularized. A friend of mine once remarked to me, “Oh, I forgot that you were in that feudal department,” a reflection of how foreign my field seemed to him. Yet with the turn to cultural history, religion became a serious topic of investigation for modern European historians. There are many reasons for this, but one in particular stands out, the emerging political impact of religious movements, including, to name two, the politicization of evangelical Christianity in the United States and the Iranian Revolution in 1979. In the latter case, the noted historian Eric Hobsbawm remarked on the novelty of a revolution led by ayatollahs and mullahs, who departed from the secular ideologies that had shaped revolutions since 1789. I quote: “For revolutionaries of the old kind, this was as bizarre a development as if Pope Pius IX had taken the lead in the Roman revolution of 1848.” The political and social impact of religion has only increased in the subsequent decades to which numerous examples attest: the attacks of 9/11, the truck attack in Nice, the emergence of the Islamic State, the renewed violence of Hindu nationalists against Muslims, Myanmar’s murder and expulsion of the Rohingya, the attacks on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh and the Chabad Synagogue near San Diego, the suicide bombing of Sri Lankan churches on Easter Sunday, and the assault on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. A few months ago, the Associated Press published a list of twenty-two “houses of worship,” an indication of the extent to which religion serves as a flashpoint for conflict and persecution. During the first half of my career, my research interests began with two books on the complicated relationship between German Protestants and Nazism, the outgrowth of my fascination with the Third Reich and my introduction in one of Tom Litzenburg’s classes to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor executed for his association with the July 1944 assassination attempt against Hitler. I subsequently shifted gears to work on other aspects of Nazism, Its leisure and tourism organization, Strength through Joy, and its imperialism. Yet now as I look for another research project in retirement, the spread of authoritarianism, neofascism and radical nationalism, especially in the seemingly stable liberal democracies of the “developed” world, unavoidably prompts comparison with the crises of the interwar period. Even Germany’s strenuous efforts to come to terms with Nazism and the Holocaust have been unable to block the emergence of the far right Alternative for Germany, now the main opposition party in the federal parliament. There has been a surge of academic commentary on authoritarianism and fascism, good examples being Steven Levitsky’s and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die, Brian Klaas’s The Despot’s Accomplice: How the West is Aiding and Abetting the Decline of Democracy, Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works, and Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s work in progress on “strongmen” from Mussolini to Trump. In fact, the historian Robert Paxton’s definition of fascism in his Anatomy of Fascism— the fear of community or national decline and the desire for community “purification,” the claim to victimhood arising from the corrosive effects of liberalism and “alien” influences, the need for the authority of “natural” (read male) chiefs, and the sanction of violence, comes ominously close to what we now witness. In light of the above, I think it is important to assess the role of religion in the current climate, especially the religious inflections of the far right. If not necessarily an indication of regular religious commitment (which in Europe is low, exceptions aside), they nonetheless appeal to the “West’s” or “Europe’s” Christian foundations to counteract what they see as the negative consequences of globalization: migration from the global south, the demographic “decline” of whites, the erosion of life chances, and the upending of “traditional” gender roles. We can start by looking at some of the acknowledged leaders of the far right, who either seek the imprimatur of religious authorities or more commonly assert their claims to protect the historical place of Christianity. Three examples from among many should suffice beginning with Vladimir Putin, who as president of the Russian Federation resurrected the Russian Orthodox Church from its purgatory under communism, returned property confiscated after the Bolshevik Revolution, reconstructed over 20,000 churches, and elevated its status as a pillar of the state and nation as it had been under the tsars. Consistent with Orthodox beliefs and echoing the far right’s “replacement theory,” which decries the declining number of whites, Putin veered from his former liberalism to oppose abortion and gay rights, feminism, tolerance, and diversity. The “West,’” concludes Putin, has rejected “Christian values.” Similarly the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, evokes the Christian foundations of the “West.” He seeks to protect “Christian Europe” and the Hungarian nation from Middle Eastern and North African refugees, 2 which taps into deeply-rooted anti-Muslim sentiments dating back to the Crusades and the Ottoman Empire’s one-time control of southeastern Europe, Hungary included. Routinely trafficking in antisemitism, the cosmology of which identifies the Jew as the transnational prime mover of a host of misfortunes, Orbán regularly attacks the Hungarian-born financier, George Soros, for advocating asylum for refugees, and promoting multiculturalism, liberalism and internationalism. In a recent meeting with President Trump, whose affinity with authoritarian leaders and conservative evangelicals is well known, the two converged on the protection of “Christian communities” throughout the world. I conclude with Matteo Salvini, the Italian deputy prime minister and minister of interior, who has recently surfaced as a European-wide leader of the far right and will likely remain so in light of his party’s performance in the recent European elections. Salvini wants to forestall the emergence of an “Islamic caliphate” in a Europe challenged by immigration and sanctify the “traditional” family, as crucial to raising the native birthrate. We are not yet at the point where we have a major political party with a large armed paramilitary linked to it, such as the Nazi Storm Troops. Still, moving to this side of the Atlantic, armed vigilantes round up asylum seekers on our southern border, and the number of hate groups, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, proliferate. We have also witnessed horrifying attacks on those designated as “other” here and elsewhere. Some recent examples suggest motivations derived from a sense of an existential crisis, in which enemies of the Christian West, Muslims and Jews especially, threaten civilization itself. The white supremacist demonstration in Charlottesville of August 2017, which ended in the murder of a counter protester, featured the iconography of the Crusades, a shield replicating that of the Knights Templar and inscribed with a red cross and “Deus Vult” (“God wills”) and the chanting of the replacement theory slogan, “Jews will not replace us.” Brenton Tarrant, the Australian who attacked two mosques in Christchurch, believed that he was standing up for the future of white Christians. The mosques he chose were in his view filled with “invaders” who represented an “assault on our civilization.” In addition to admiring Radovan Karadzić, the Serbian leader found guilty of genocide against Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s, Tarrant claimed to have communicated with Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian who is currently in prison for detonating a lethal bomb in Oslo and murdering seventy children at a summer camp eight years ago. Taking the title “Knight Justiciar” drawn also from the Knights Templar, Breivik placed himself at the forefront
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