This panel brings together three different perspectives on violence in the history of Christianity in response to the AAR Presidential call to understand violence in relation to "the hierarchical understanding of beings and valuation of their lives." Papers examine Christian and Jewish accounts of violence during the First Crusade (1096-1099); the political thought and theology of Martin Luther in response to the German Peasants’ War (1524-1525); and patterns of institutionalized violence in contemporary American Evangelicalism. Looking at narratives and structures that enforced otherness of religious identity, class, gender, and sexuality will enable a deep, comparative investigation of continuity and change in the reifying of boundaries between the centers and peripheries of the Christian world.
This paper will elucidate how Christendom within popular imagination, spurred on by coalescing imperial identities, created and forced violence upon minority persons, such as Jews, in the build-up to the first crusade. While we think of the crusades as acts of war within the Near East, we need to disrupt this perceived binary of Christians and Muslims. Looking at the formations of modern antisemitism is more crucial than ever. This paper will look at the Jewish sources of the Rhineland massacres to understand the reception and reaction to Christian crusading ideology outside of a pure Christian/Muslim binary and to see how Christendom interacted with new ideas of national identity to purposefully and violently create an Other. This violence will be understood through theories of narrative fracture that unveil the continued trauma, even in narrating the accounts themselves.
In May 1525, Luther published a fiery pamphlet titled Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants. Luther found little understanding for rebelling against legal authorities with violent actions, especially when conducted under the name of Christ. Before encouraging rulers to take the sword to strike the rebels down, he advised them to offer the peasants an opportunity to come to terms, “even though they are not worthy of it.” This paper presents a historical arch, examining the development of Luther’s political and theological thought behind the well-known pamphlet. The paper examines the shifts in the historical context affecting Luther’s theological connotations, claiming that the idea of peace as a primary solution remains in Luther’s societal teaching while promoting the ruler’s duty to carry the sword. The paper presents changes in Luther’s biblical teaching related to the lived experiences in the 1520s in the ever-changing societal and ecclesial realms.
Informed by the new historiography of American evangelicalism and critical, queer, and feminist theory, this paper is a strategic intervention in the social and cultural history of the sexual politics of conservative evangelicalism in the United States. Relying on a careful analysis of a wide range of primary sources (e.g., autobiographical literature, social media posts, and church-adjacent documentation), I frame the seemingly disparate enunciative modalities of contemporary evangelical Christian intimacy as taking place within a dense cluster of related discursive regimes. Moreover, I connect these threads through their effects as examples of discursive violence.1 This cluster of discursive regimes produces new subjectivities that hinge on the violence(s) of mandatory heterosexuality, misogyny, and the normalization of patterns of institutionalized abuse and gendered violence. Case studies of “celibate Gay Christian” homonationalism, the imperial, white supremacist logics of “tradwives,” and the neo-Volkskörper of Christian Nationalism converge against the backdrop of rapidly changing coordinates of public space and place, ever increasing socio-economic precarity, and the decline of the public sphere under neoliberal capitalism. The paper includes a discussion of how these American-born cultural products are being exported elsewhere, especially to Europe.