CANCELED: Make Museums Great Again: How Evangelical Christians Wage Culture Wars Through Historic Sites

This lecture has been canceled due to illness. Watch for a new date this fall.

At first glance, history museums seem like pretty secular spaces—sites for education and tourism. But many history museums in the United States challenge the supposed divide between the “sacred” and the “secular,” including museums owned and operated by white evangelical Christians. In this talk, Devin Manzullo-Thomas, assistant professor of American religious history at Messiah University, examines how sites like the Museum of the Bible use history to naturalize narratives of American history that privilege a certain kind of Christianity and to stir moral panics about the decline of Christian values in society. He is author of "Exhibiting Evangelicalism: Commemoration, Conservative Christianity, and Religion’s Presence of the Past," (University of Massachusetts Press, 2022). Cosponsored by the McFarland Center and the Department of History.

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Co-hosted with: History Department