Saving History: How White Evangelicals Tour the Nation’s Capital and Redeem a Christian America. By Lauren R. Kerby

Extract

Lauren Kerby’s Saving History is an insightful study of Christian heritage tourism in Washington, D.C. These popular tours draw several thousand primarily white, evangelical Christians to the nation’s capital each year. As such, Kerby argues, the tours are crucial to comprehending how these religious actors narrate American history and then use their visions of the past to make sense of their identity and their responsibilities to the state in the present. We need to understand white evangelicals’ “lived history,” Kerby further asserts, because they constitute one of the nation’s most influential and most consistent voting blocs. As she writes, “How [evangelicals] talk about history reveals how they plot themselves into the American story. This in turn tells us how they will tend to respond to certain events, based on the available narratives and how they have deployed those narratives in the past” (p. 146).

To inform her study, Kerby, a religion scholar trained in ethnographic methods, draws on field work conducted in 2014 and 2015 while embedded in nine different multiday Christian heritage tours of D.C. She observes that white evangelicals’ ideas about the past are shaped by many sources, including “the tour guides’ talks, the literature and signage available at the sites, their embodied experiences, and the material features of the sites themselves” as well as “fragments of stories they had once heard in church or school, stories they had heard from friends, and stories they had seen on the news and social media” (p. 5). She argues that, by drawing on these diverse sources, the tourists develop four sometimes conflicting but always potent stories about the United States and evangelicals’ place in it. Kerby uses these four stories to structure her study.