List of Topics
Ian Baucom and Mary Poovey: Financing Enlightenment—At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the volume and kinds of financial instruments available for extending credit increased dramatically, alongside and as part of the establishment of the central institutions of modern British finance. These financial instruments—foreign and inland bills of exchange, Bank of England notes, and checks, among others—facilitated the movement of capital within and beyond the shores of England, thereby funding the expansion of English trade and laying the groundwork for the elaboration of a consumer society in which goods traveled as rapidly as the ideas we associate with the Enlightenment. These financial instruments, of course, also mediated value—both in the sense that they helped apply a monetary measure of value to objects and people and in the sense that they levied a fee, in the form of interest, for the time and risk to which they subjected an investor's money. In this paper, we address some of the complexities of the role this form of mediation played in extending the reach of the Enlightenment. We are interested, for example, in the connection between violence and the deployment of speculative capital in the eighteenth century, the extent to which violence became a mechanism for augmenting speculative capital in particular parts of the world, and whether some form of violence is inherent in monetary mediation, or whether its prevalence in the eighteenth century was contingent and specific to this time and these places.
John Brewer: From cyber-punk to the Enlightenment: Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle—The paper uses Stephenson's massive three volume Baroque Cycle focused on the Royal Society, Newton, Hooke, and Leibniz and the relations between money, markets and science to investigate popular ways in which enlightenment ideas are disseminated today. It connects Stephenson's move from "cool" cyber-punk to a historical science fiction to his contemporary concerns with the relations between power, technology and knowledge as elaborated in such essays as "Beyond the Command line". It also connects Stephenson's critique to the concerns of critics like David Foster Wallace to develop a fiction that moves beyond (a rather impotent) ironic, cool detachment that is sometimes seen as post-modern.
Lisa Gitelman: Focusing on the "Past and Present" of mediation, I will be speaking about "Modes and Codes: Samuel F. B. Morse and the Visual Culture of Text." My purpose is not to deliver a paper by that title but rather to use the work-in-progress it signifies to introduce some questions about +doing+ media history and perhaps a word of caution about typological thinking. In particular, it seems pressing to ask—in light of recent "media archeologies"—whether or how mediation possesses both an Enlightenment past-present and a counter-Enlightenment past-present. What sorts of schematics "work" in accounts of technological change and what sorts do not? (And how is "working" the mutual result of the changes it considers?) Too, if the "Past and Present" of our subject considers the 18th Century and today, how does the in-between 19th Century fit, well, in between?
Adrian Johns: The printing counter-revolution—I will look at a number of campaigns from the period c.1750 to c.1840 that sought to undermine central aspects of the order of print as it had developed to that point, literary property in particular. One was led by a London artisan called Jacob Ilive, who mounted a kind of workers' revolt against the copy-owners in favor of a rival, moral-economy notion of print (with a really bizarre theology underpinning it); the second was led by a Romantic poet called Samuel Edgerton Brydges, who set up a printing house to recreate a kind of counter-canon of old poets who had been sidelined by the copyright regime (and led the campaign in Parliament in the 1810s to abolish the library deposit requirement); and the third was caused by Charles Babbage, the Victorian computer man. The first two are centrally concerned with the 'past' of a medium (Brydges is the counter-revolutionary intent on undoing what has been done). The third leads into the 'present' by virtue of Babbage's strongly linked concerns for science, technology, and calculational regimes.
K. Ludwig Pfeiffer: Facts and Fiction(ality). Mediation as Compromise—In the wake of Mary Poovey and others, I will examine the theoretical, cultural and media tensions which came to haunt the 18th century and produced the (conceptual monster of) "fiction of probable reality" (Elena Esposito). In such a situation, performative mediation, that is new theatrical forms, do not provide a solution, but a culturally operational eluding of a problem personified, e.g., in the relations between Dr. Johnson and Garrick.
William Clark: The Work of the Enlightenment and the Romance of the Scientist—European Enlightenment (EE) sided with realism in its perennial battle with romance. Work is a central motif of realism, largely absent in romances, where life is game-like. EE saw knowledge as work that could be mechanized, automated, stored, transferred, and so on. This is the realist story of homo æconomicus ("Robinson Crusoe"), the background of my paper. The focus aims at stories EE spun about its own efforts and ilk. These told of a romantic, aristocratic world of leisurely endeavor. Heroes solve riddles and puzzles, hunt or quest for the secret of life or the universe, and so on. Science is a game, a play, a sacred ritual where, as in folktale, profane work is absent or a nightmare, e.g. spinning straw into gold, which only true virtuosi can do. This is the romantic story of homo cerebralis ("Victor Frankenstein"). EE ended with self-registering machines and the cult of genius (S. Schaffer), the former a key instance of mediation, the latter a clear obstacle.
Ann Blair and Peter Stallybrass: Organizing Knowledge Before the Enlightenment—We will consider a number of practices for managing and organizing knowledge and information which were widely used in the Enlightenment and beyond, but which originated in earlier methods of working. We will survey some of the standard procedures in 16th and 17th centuries for note-taking, commonplacing, filing, duplicating and compiling. In addition each of us will focus on a case study. Ann will examine the use of slips in managing notes and compiling large books from the surviving manuscripts of Conrad Gesner and Theodor Zwinger (16th-century Zurich and Basel). Peter will analyze the painting of "The Merchant" by Gossaert, to emphasize the significance of mercantile practices, and the note-taking of Samuel Pepys, to highlight the role of bureaucratic state practices.
Knut Ove Eliassen and Yngve Sandhei Jacobsen: Where were the Media before Samuel Morse?—Taking as a cue Bruno Latour's famous essay on Pasteur's microbes, the issue we would like to discuss is what problems might be involved in analyzing a pre-18C cultural phenomena like the Enlightenment and its discursive manifestations with a concept—medium (in the sense of "technological medium of communication")—that is a true born child of the advent of the new media in the first half of the 19C. Our perspective does not limit itself to historical semantics (in the sense of Begriffsgeschichte) and how the historical mutations of conceptual fields produce, organize and reorganize fields of knowledge and cognition; we would also like to investigate the relationship between these conceptual shifts and the historical changes and reorganizations of the institutions and apparatuses they relate to.
Janine Barchas: Grubstreet or High Street? Curll or Richardson? What's the Difference?—Bookseller Edmund Curll (1675-1747) and master printer Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) each ran thriving businesses in London's eighteenth-century book trade. The reputations and literary legacies of Curll and Richardson, however, could not be more distinct. Critical discussion of these two major print-culture figures, both then and now, vilifies the former (his critical biography is entitled The Unspeakable Curll) and lionizes the latter. This paper intends to bring Curll and Richardson, and by extension Grubstreet ephemera and high literature, into closer proximity. It will explore the mediation of literary value (past and present) through a reconsideration of the overlapping business practices of these two men.
William Warner: Declaring Enlightenment—During the long 18th century there appeared a new political genre, the public “declaration.” The declaration made fundamental political claims on behalf of the people (or some other, more restricted group). Particular examples include the English Parliament’s Declaring the Rights and Liberties of the Subject and Settling the Succession of the Crown (1689), the 1772 “Declaration” of the Town of Boston (the Votes and Proceedings of the Town of Boston); Continental Congress’s Declaration of (Independence of) 1776; the National Assembly’s 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. While these declarations have been extensively studied as documents that propound political ideas and use particular forms of rhetoric to do so, their relation to the larger eighteenth century media sphere are less well understood. Thus over the course of the interval between the 1689 and 1789 declarations I will consider how the declaration, as a genre for mediating enlightenment, artfully commingles all three communication media (speech, manuscript writing, and print), engages the distinctive Enlightenment era communications infrastructure (the postal system, the newspaper, and the public assembly), and assumes a more or less effective representative function (the invention of the “we” to speak in the name of the “people”). In assuming this representative function, the declaration sometimes gains the effective power to perform a political role that the makers of the declaration are not, speaking in strictly legal terms, authorized to perform: thus the revolutionary, as well as foundational potential of these declarations. By embedding the declaration within the larger communications network that gives it efficacy, I hope to trace how the genre of the declaration engages “technologies” of Enlightenment that are material and ideological, as well as formal and generic.
Anne Beate Maurseth: Mediating game in the 18th century—Game is a frequent motive in 18th century literature. But is it just a motive? Maybe it is possible to state that game supplies literature with not only a fascinating motive but that it also provides it with rhetorical and narrative strategies? In the Enlightenment, game is associated with moral refutation, psychological dependence, mathematical calculus and social divertissement. It is often considered as a world of its own that appears as fictional. Game is a source of knowledge that is transferable, but how is g ame- knowledge transferred from the particular game to other practices? My paper aims to figure out how game is mediated in various texts from the 18th century. Moral, anthropological and epistemological aspects will be discussed in order to see whether it is possible to mediate between the function of game and the game-function of specific texts.
Dorinda Outram: Objects as Media: the transparent mask, and the Enlightenment wars of truth—Media are not simply to be understood as visual or verbal representations. Objects and practices also carry messages between observers. As a case in point I examine the ways that masks and mask-wearing intervened in the intense struggles in the Enlightenment over the meaning of truth. What was the true face of someone wearing a mask? How could masks force inconvenient truths to emerge? and how were masks linked to the collapse of categories involved in social and gender metamorphosis?
Maureen McLane: Mediating Antiquarians in Britain, 1760-1830: The Invention of Oral Tradition, or, Close-Reading Before Coleridge—One genealogy for a historical media analysis of poetry and culture lies, I suggest, in the 18th C. British ballad revival, its attendant scandals (forgery, 'touching up,' et.), and related ethnopoetic phenomena such as the Ossian poems. These episodes belong not just to literary history, folklore studies, or cultural studies but also to a historically-alert media studies, for it was through these ethno-poetical controversies that British literati began to theorize—precisely through their antagonisms—the status of oral tradition alongside and against other modes of poetic mediation (e.g. multiple, simultaneous, and sometimes overlapping oral, writerly, and print modalities). What we find in this period is not so much the "invention of tradition" (viz. Hugh Trevor-Roper) as the invention of traditional mediation. In recent decades, scholars have re-animated the 18th C. British ballad revival and literary antiquarian debates; what has been too little noted is the way these controversies consistently forced a definition of the object in view. In other words: what was [is] a ballad? and what is oral tradition? Despite the remarkable proliferation of ballad collections in the 18th C., it was by no means obvious what a ballad was. Throughout the 18th C., antiquarians and poet-editors found themselves struggling to define ballads and to establish a balladeering provenance; these literati also struggled to surmount their own anti-oral prejudices (often aligned with anti-Scottish prejudice). The "hybrid" textual-oral status of ballads (cf Paula McDowell's important recent work) offers us, then, a striking test case for considering both the historicity of media and the history of how scholarship makes its objects. Late 18th C. British balladeering sits at a crucial juncture of media and enlightenment: its primary figures were literary antiquarians, a species of scholar typically contrasted with enlightenment thinkers (viz. Momigliano, and satires within the period). Yet a complex dialectic emerges between 18th C. "antiquarianism" and "enlightenment," as Susan Manning's and Mark Salber Phillips' recent work differently but pointedly suggests. The "stadial theory" of history of the Scottish enlightenment provided the framework for antiquarian research and musing; the proliferation of detail for which antiquarians were famous loosely co-existed with broader sociological paradigms of progressive development—typically modelled as movement from a "rude" hunting age through agriculture toward a triumphal commercial, civil society. In its preoccupation with mediality, and its navigation of both enlightenment historiography and antiquarian eclecticism, balladeering asks us to complicate and hopefully enrich our standard accounts of "enlightenment" and "media." I would also argue that antiquarian balladeering asks us to take another look at "close reading," for it was precisely through an agonistic, forensic close-reading that literati made their cases, established their authority, and bequeathed to later scholars the literary-historical paradigms, objects, and anthologies within and against which we still move.
Carsten Meiner: The literary carriage from Furetière to Diderot. The material logic of chance-meetings in early modern Europe—According to the historians (Roche, Munby, Wackernagel, Monrose, Beyrer, Studeny) the carriage is an invention of the late 17th century consolidated throughout Europe during the 18th century. In my paper I shall start out by giving a short historical outline of the material, technological and economical conditions of this invention. Focusing on the wide-ranging cultural, social and moral repercussions that the rationalisation of the carriage-systems has on the 18th century, this outline is however not solely meant to describe the omnipresence of the carriage as a social and cultural phenomenon. It is also aimed at two points. Firstly, that a variety of discourses integrates, discusses and evaluates the carriage, and in so doing they create different versions of what the carriage is, what its role is, what it is capable of, who should ride it and who shouldn’t, why it is good, necessary or dangerous, why and how its movements should be regulated. These discourses thus multiply the carriage as an object, complexify its role and cultural meaning and endow it with a serial discursive history: the writings of carriage and road engineers (e.g. Roubo, L’Art du carrossier 1765 and Isaac Taylor Currus civilis : or genteel designs for coaches and chariots, post-chaises… 1774, MacAdam, Remarks on the present System of Road-Making, 1819) produce a technological history of the carriage describing the functionality of its materiality; the moralists evaluate and condemn the carriage (e.g. Boileau, Lichtenberg, Mercier), economists like Turgot try to optimize its worth, legal acts (privilèges, lettres patentes, Road acts, taxation) regulate and limit the movements of the carriages. Still other discourses, (postal, sexual, urban, class-oriented ones for instance), could be mentioned. One of the discourses which also integrate and use the carriage is that of the novel. In the light of the carriage’s widespread presence in everyday life and consequently the reader’s effortless identification and recognition of carriage-dependant situations and incidents, the carriage becomes a commonplace in the novel, acquiring its own stable literary functionality: not that of transporting persons from A to B, but that of integrating Chance or unforeseen events into the narrative. On the background of this literary functionality I shall analyse passages from Furetière (Le Roman bourgeois), Defoe (Moll Flanders), Marivaux (Le Paysan parvenu), Diderot (La Religieuse) and Goethe (Die Leiden des jungen Werther). These analyses show how the literary carriages function as mediations between on the one hand recognizable situations, cultural commonplaces, and on the other, through the notion of Chance, an actualization and exploration of the virtual problematic dimensions that these everyday situations comprise. In conclusion these analyses lead to a discussion of the possibility of a new literary topology.
Peter De Bolla: I will focus on the idea of 'concept formation'—or, more properly, how concepts get formed—and will address this problem in relation to the Wealth of Nations. Does what we understand by the Enlightenment depend upon the invention of new concepts—aesthetics, the human sciences etc—or is it merely a repackaging of old concepts? This obviously asks the question of history in a profound way—continuous development vs radical break—and also that of mediation—how to recognise a concept as a concept if it is really new.
Arvind Rajagopal: "Enlightenment" in India—What is the tutelary character of "enlightenment" in countries whose own experience of it has followed on the culture contact of colonial rule? I suggest that enlightenment in India, such as it is, has to be understood as connected to, if not as part of the movement for national liberation, rather than as the private activity of the educated classes alone. Politics mediate and accompany "mass awakening," which is one way the freedom movement in India can be characterized. It should not be surprising to learn that the masses often defended the cause of freedom more vigorously than the leaders themselves—as for example when workers in 1908 protesting the arrest of Lokmanya Tilak, a national leader, were killed by police firing while political leaders were scarce in their response, or when crowds demonstrated to protest the abrogation of press freedoms when newspaper editors themselves were silent, in 1925. A literacy-aware (but often illiterate) population was willing to be led by educated men and women, and found no reason to make the compromises their leaders readily embraced at times. The majority learned the lessons of freedom in anti-colonial mobilization, and have continued to learn them fitfully since then, through uneven forms of modernization and democratization (for the task was hardly complete when independence was achieved in 1947). If the process of subject formation associated with enlightenment depends on the education of the senses, this tutelage is commonly acknowledged to be challenged by the unsettlement accompanying new technologies of perception, and the need to be socialized into new ways of seeing and being. In the west, this historical crisis of experience is subsequent to the formation of national cultures. Its political ramifications can thus be contained (or appear to be contained) domestically, through expert means of mediation, e.g., through technocratic debates on objectivity and neutrality as codes of conduct for professionals, and, if we accept the art historian Jonathan Crary's account, through debates on attention and attention-management as a new locus for securing the idea of a self-sufficient knowing subject (Crary 1999). In countries like India, however this crisis occurs while nation-building is relatively inchoate. Its reverberations thus move from existential to political levels, telescoping issues of individual identity into larger ones of national form. My paper will draw from recent examples of political and visual culture, ranging from the Ram Janmabhumi or Birthplace of Ram campaign, that brought the Hindu nationalist party to power from 1998-2004, to instances of public imagery and market publicity, to consider what kinds of subject formation may be deduced from these attempts to mediate and exploit the turbulent experiences of market growth and democratization in India.
Robert Miles: Romanticism as the Product of a Mediated Enlightenment—Gillen Darcy Wood has recently argued that Romanticism defined it self in opposition to a burgeoning mass media typified by increasingly sophisticated 'simulations' of the real. My essay posits just the reverse of this. I will, for example, argue that the 'Romantic self' is best understood as a product of a rapidly expanding print culture.
Paula McDowell: Print Culture and the Idea of Oral Tradition in Eighteenth-Century Britain.
Helge Jordheim: Mediating the Present: Temporalities of the Enlightenment—Since I first started working with Enlightenment literature and philosophy, I been fascinated by Foucault’s claim, in his famous essay from 1984, that in Kant’s Was ist Aufklärung? as well as in Enlightenment thinking more generally, it is a question of understanding the present, la pure actualité. In other words: “It doesn’t venture to understand the present from the perspective of the future. It looks for a difference: quelle différrence aujourd’hui introduit-il par rapport à hier?” In his answer to Foucault, Habermas – in an unusual moment of lyrical inspiration – compares Kant to an archer pointing his arrow at the heart of the present. To me this seminar presents a possibility for exploring this claim a bit further, having to do both with the question of mediation and with the relationship between past and present, i.e. with the question of temporality. In Kant’s text the différrence of the present is not least due to the emergence of new media, primarily the printed text, as a necessary precondition for the universality of reason. However, we need only to think of Herder’s philosophy of language to recognize that universal reason and writing as a historical and cultural product might indeed be subject to very different temporal structures and processes. Reason and writing are not necessarily contemporaneous – in the literal sense of the word. Hence, the question arises how this temporal contradiction, this incontemporaneity or Ungleichzeitigkeit, relate to the notion of the Enlightenment as a reflection on the present. To explore this question I am going to reread both Foucault’s and Kant’s texts as well as literary and philosophical texts from the 18th century. As has probably become obvious, my plan for this paper is very open and I would be happy to collaborate with anyone interested in similar questions.
Michael McKeon: The Pre-History of the Division between Science and the Arts—Apart from the pleasure scientists take in characterizing superior science in terms of its "beauty" and "elegance," modern thought regards aesthetic experience as antithetical to empiricist epistemology and scientific method. This antithesis is belied by the history of these modern categories as they cohered in England and France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns ostensibly was devoted to debating the evaluative significance of a great diachronic divide that increasingly seemed in itself unquestionable. But a by-product of this debate, the synchronic division between the sciences and the arts, would become no less important for modernity than the diachronic one. The synchronic division coalesced as one between those kinds of knowledge that are susceptible to incrementally progressive improvement and those that are not. However its initial effect was to encourage the theorization of what later would be called "aesthetic" experience not in opposition to, but in emulation of, empiricism and its first principle that epistemological distance is the necessary precondition for all reliable knowledge. In the critical essays of Dryden, Fontenelle, Shaftesbury, Addison, Du Bos, Pope, Hume, Burke, Smith, Young, and Johnson, and in the novelistically-embedded criticism of Fielding and Sterne, we can see the emergence of the theory of the aesthetic as an explicit response to the Quarrel. This idea of the aesthetic emerges as a special sort of knowing that achieves empiricist distance as the basis not for the cumulative knowledge of the sciences but for the virtual knowledge that Coleridge at the end of the eighteenth century would identify with "the willing suspension of disbelief." Soon after this the aesthetic began its long modern devolution into a secular mode of idealism whose work is to transcend the empirical and no longer to mediate between it and the understanding.
Tue Andersen Nexø: Public debate and the critique of wit in early 18th century England—I want to analyze the criticism of polemical wit in Joseph Addison's and Richard Steele's The Spectator. I propose to see this polemical wit as the opposite of that "polite imagination" through which the periodical essay wanted to refine its readers, to connect it with the forms of debate that dominated printed, political discourse in the early 18th century, and to use it to throw new light on the emergent discourse of aesthetics in the early 18th century. Theoretically, my contribution will be in a (mostly critical) dialogue with Jürgen Habermas' book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, but will also draw on recent book history—and on the german historian of ideas Reinhart Koselleck.
William St. Clair: The Political Economy of Reading—This paper looks at books and reading as a whole and over a long time span. I begin by suggesting some of the big questions that 'the history of the book' should address. What were the conditions within which books came into existence in the form that they did, and not in others? How were those books that did come into existence produced, sold, distributed, and read, in what numbers, by which constituencies of readers, and over which timescales?—again asking why these events happened in the ways they did and not in others? And what were the consequences of the reading of the texts that were inscribed in, and that were carried by, the books? What were the effects on the minds of their readers, and on the mentalities of the wider society within which the reading took place. By mentalities, a word adopted from the French, I mean the beliefs, feelings, values, and dispositions to act in certain ways that are prevalent in a society at a particular historical and cultural conjuncture, including not only states of mind that are explicitly acknowledged but others that are unarticulated or regarded as fixed or natural. And although I say 'books' for convenience, I include journals, newspapers, and other media.
Bernhard Siegert : The Birth of Enlightened Literature out of the Police Office (Schiller, Kant, Mercier)—In German the notion "Aufklärung" ("Enlightenement") has a military meaning and a meaning referring to the work of the police as well as a philosophical meaning. The paper will show that both meanings are closely connected in 18th century knowledge discourses. One can comprehend the "birth of literature out of the spirit of the police" on the basis of Schiller's drama fragment "Die Polizey" ("The Police") wich deals (in vain) with the problem of how the theatre could represent a reality so manifold as it is a city like Paris. The first objective of the paper will be to show that in Schiller's text the Kantian problem of the synthesis of representations has been transferred to the system of information processing of the police. In Kant the name of the synthetic unity of the manifold is “Ich denke” ("I think"), in Schiller its name is "the police". The second objective will be to show, in going back to Schiller's main source Sebastien Mercier, how a vision of literature is developing from the the practice of surveillance executed by the Parisian police especially in connection with the opening of private letters. The third objective of the paper will be to show in short, how this discourse that links the individual with the knowledge practices of the police is continued in Goethe and even in Kafka, where it is turned against the writing "I". The overall objective of the paper will be to illustrate the epistemological value of the notion of "medium" which is specific for the type of "media archaeology" in which I and others in German media studies are involved.
John Bender: From Englightenment Reason to Rational Choice—I will engage eighteenth-century "reason" as an idealized system for mediating action, with a glance at its pre-history in Ramism and significant focus on its post-war WWII stylizations in Rational Choice Theory. I will consider, especially, how "reason" plays out in the realms of love and marriage, using La Princesse de Clèves and Les Liaisons Dangeuerses as examples.
Anne Fastrup: Denis Diderot Les philosophes against the periodical press—In my paper I will discuss Diderot's famous second satire, Le neveu de Rameau, within the frames of the relationship between the encyclopedists and the periodical press. Since Goethes translation of the satire into German in the beginning of the 19th century it has been common to see Diderots dialogue as a response to the opponents of the Encyclopédia, that is as a defence of the Enlightenment against conservative forces within the French society of l'ancien régime. I will suggest that this is a too uncritical understanding of the encyclopedists philosophical and political ideas and of Enlightenment as such. A very important part of the satire is directed against journalists, especially those who did not limit themselves to the opinionless reporting of the Journal des savants. Diderot, Voltaire, d'Alembert and others detested journalist who intervened in the cultural and political life of the time, especially of course those who did it in a manner hostile to the articles and ideas presented in the Encyclopédia. What does the fact that the encyclopedists did not want their ideas to be discussed in a broader public sphere reveal about their perception of enlightenment and reason? Was the unconscious finality of Enlightenment to stop rather than to initiate publique discussion? The philosophe-Moi of Le neveu de Rameau describes himself as a distant dreamer that led things slide while amusing himself with his inner thoughts. Is this a critical auto-portrait of the philosophe as someone who withdraws from society rather than someone who is engaged in creating a better world as it were?
Michael Warner: Preacher's Footing—Michael will build upon his current work on the long history of preaching, by focusing on a "series of destabilizing moments in the early eighteenth century. Evangelicalism at that time was taking shape in the new media environment of the public sphere, and must therefore be understood in terms of its formal practices. The relation between evangelical preaching and the public of strangers clarifies some of the contradictions in Christian nationalism and secularism alike."