what kind of psychic wound that would make on a small child. and a nice thing a quote that i had was when she said they took us away from our children, separated us from our families. i will never forget. it was only for working. they treated it like a crime. >> you can watch and other programs on line at booktv.org. ..

her teaching specialization is 19th century american thinkers. heard new book "the religion of democracy" reflects her studies at boston university where she earned her phd in religious studies centers at yale, harvard and princeton.

the "the religion of democracy" creates the 18th century to the 20th by tracing the connections among the thinkers through whom they know, what they read and wrote, where they went and how they expressed opinions from john adams to william james to jane addams from boston to chicago to berkeley. reviewers are praising amy's book. for his new life into intellectual history for scholars and concerned citizens whether religious or not. of lively and erudite reminder of deep rates in american soil in religious role in putting them there. it's also been called eliminating stories for our time as well as what it tells us about the past. please join me in welcoming amy kittelstrom. thank you [applause] >> thank you.

thank you for coming. it's nice to be here and see that there are people interested in reading and ideas. cinco de mayo you could be looking for a happy hour special but instead you are here making a choice about what to do with your time and the choices we make are the most important thing about who we are and that contention is a product of the research i did for this book which i can't lay out the arguments of someone in the short time but i hope to give you some sense of what is inside the cover to explain enough that you can understand the passage i am planning on reading. it took me 15 years to write this book and usually the longer it takes a scholar to produce something smaller their audience dance which is a paradox that has to do in part with the place

of the university in american culture said those few americans who are still readers tend to see more of the works of journalists are people turning a profit on the writing rather than people writing for the sake of intellectual liberty which is a scholars do. i'm grateful this book has started to reach a wider public and the only thing we know ensnare shapers of american culture and not mere victims of it. i hope this book empowers you as readers also. so i just thought i would say a little bit about where the book came from in my own thinking and how it developed over time. it started with a question that is not in historical question of that that preoccupied me a lot in my youth, which is a question of how it is possible to hold a belief sincerely and at the same

time really respect somebody who holds a different belief. that's not an historical question. it's a question about pluralism and living in a society where people disagree with one another and have different backgrounds, different values, different goals and they have to harmonize them not together say they do that i eventually coming to believe one thing i learned how to deal with this agreement. these are the questions on my mind when i was a graduate student in history and working on converting such questions about the way things should we in the questions about the way things were. in the course of that search i found this philosopher who is well known in some circles and not in others in his name is william james. he's maybe arguably the most

influential american philosopher. it may be tired as ralph waldo emerson who is a bigger global reputation but whose writings influenced william james quite a bit. so james lived mostly in boston although he traveled to europe quite a day. he was born in 1842 and died in 1910. the reason i started him almost against my will was because i found his ways of talking about these kinds of questions to believe, human difference in how to treat one another so compelling. so when i was a graduate didn't and that the dissertation phase of writing what became this book, i thought by working through james' writings and readings and associations in his time, i can understand religion at a moment when america was

modernizing and leaving behind traditional ways of thinking and producing an intellectual culture more like the one we live in. by doing so and asking questions about what he thought about religion, which was decidedly a non-christian form of religion, i ultimately found that way of thinking had christian roots. my book had to go back and understand those root and then take them into the 20th century. we actually have a specifically christian kind of orientation that is represented in our public culture today and also not the kind represented in scholarship. it is a non-evangelical form of religion because it is about not forcing other people into your way of thinking. that if some of the action that

is happening in the book that is figure after figure over time, dealing with detention between their own individual way of seeing thinking, knowing and acting in a living community with people who have different ways of seeing, thinking knowing and not and how they were sent out over time. one of the things that happen is they decided to think of themselves as liberals which has almost no relation to dais labeled liberal which connects to a certain set of political commitment that has to do with the nature of governance and what it should provide. those are fixed ideas. has been not moving in the way the past liberals thought of what they meant by that term is to be liberal meant to be open-minded to believe they

didn't know the whole truth and to be inclusive. that is to include everyone who would also be engaged in eq not truth. that is a little bit of something about the vocabulary that is in the book. i am going to read this passage from the chapter on william james. each chapter is devoted to one specific figure, but they are not eye out for fees. the goal of the book is not simply to have you get to know these past historical actors. although you will get to know them. i am not making claims they are representative of large, large groups of people but instead each of the chapter is organized a specific figure allows us to see the world through their eyes. and that is a historical discipline that is to leave our

moment behind and to look at the past on its own terms. so that is the action of historical writing and historical thinking and it allows us to see ways that people have blinders on in the past and what those blinders were, how there was a mismatch between what they held a great deal of and what they wanted to do did in society. so that is one benefit of these characters. they were all interconnected. i used this method of working through the sources one by one and networking out into this longer narrative that covers a couple hundred years. so the first chapter about john adams who became our second president but the part of his life that i cover in my chapter gets just into the revolutionary

era has connections in webbing that goes across different chapters. we hear a little bit of that in this passage were john adams comes up and the minister is important in the 19th century also is going to come up and hopefully you will hear a representation of the kind of approach consistent with the whole book. so when this passage, the only other part you need to know to understand is that is focusing on a monument erected on boston common to the massachusetts 54th regiment. a lot of people might have seen the film glory which was a fictionalized representation of the all-black regiment in the civil war. by historical standards is pretty good for hollywood. they quite approve of glory's

overall depiction of that group of soldiers and the monument which was erected on boston common. i took a picture of it on my cell phone that's not illustration in the book. a person could snap a pic worth including and i would just indulge in a quick anecdote about that. i hope it is descriptive of some of the paradox of having limited sight in ideals that clash with in practice. this is this past summer. i went to the monument. i hadn't been there in a while. i was feeling a little emotional. i took my picture would my picture when there were no other tourists around so i got a pretty good shot and then i stood off to the side of the monument for a few minutes

taking in the scene. i thought to african-americans in front of the monument taking turns taking each other's picture. there is a hero american woman with her husband has started talking us that her husband had been asked to in the film glory. she's trying to make a friendship with them. she was taking a picture of the monument and one of the men within the frame and edged out of the frame and she said i was hoping you would stay in. so what she meant was she wanted him to provide a sort of living color in her picture. this is a little bit object to find out then. i thought i would share that because it was illustrative of the way our past historical actors like us had ideals that didn't match reality. the mechanism of this thing i

call the religion of democracy in the book i call practical idealism. it is about having ideas and construct in your practice to get towards those ideals. it doesn't mean they get realized immediately. i think that is enough for me to get into this section. i really look forward to questions and comments in any reflection. battled liberal conversation where liberal conversation means of course everybody is speaking their own viewpoints by their own vantage point. by their own integrity and of course equally listening to one another. i know quite about this one. everyone here has thoughts about democracy that i would also like to hear. so this is the beginning of the section about american religion.

at the northeast corner of boston common stands a bronze and granite monument a sculpture previously commissioned by the grieving son of john adams, war memorial and the image at the grave of his wife clover. for the monument on the common was hired by the parents of the find civil war colonel robert walsh with the enlisted men at the 54th massachusetts volunteer regiment. the union's most famous military deployment of former slaves and descendents of slaves. a lot of their side. the shah's decision was consistent with their insistence that their son's corpse they left in a common grave at this man and south carolina rather than receiving a hero's burial back in boston. this resolved makes the shots in the monument to the safety for outliers on the landscape of

civil war memory. one federal version of reconstruction with the rich olive troops of south in 1877 most of the country agree to act as though the civil war had not been fought for emancipation and indeed have little to do with slavery. a collective amnesia reflected in the majority of civil war monuments depict it only a classic or soldiers, confederate or union often mounted and always brave. the monument is one of the few that include african-americans at all of the others mostly pictures slaves kneeling and standing soldiers bestow freedom upon their passive offense at my figures. they are the soldiers march with resolute faces each set of features unique, postures prodded to write their guns at the shoulder their packs neatly rolled the mounted figure of

colonel shaw a relation of john adams wife and william valerie channing's college friend. the inscription emphasizes novel to the end of slavery the meaning of the war it was something the white officers in the black rank of vaio accomplished together. these volunteers gave to the nation and the world undine proved that americans of african descent possess the pride courage and devotion of the patriot soldiers. those quotations are drawn from the inscription on the back of the monument. the monument is always liberal culture that made it possible strenuously affirmed the civil war was about slavery and about fulfilling the promise of american freedom. the monument was unveiled on memorial day 1897 with the remaining survivors as the regiment in places of honor. afterward the crowd moved down

the road to the music hall or theater parker once delivered sermons and supported the knowledge of human rights not illustrated in the monument. to speakers at the commemoration and 3000 spectators in the audience. once it was a pretty washington, the most prominent former saving the country. frederick douglass died in 1895 the saner washington gave an address at the exposition in atlanta in which he promised to accommodate jim crow. washington had risen up from slavery as the title ii his autobiography put up with the help of white philanthropist to be followed in believing that african-americans worked hard and got the skills industrial america needed discrimination would not be a barrier. in boston the lead of washington that drew the most applause shows that a great politician he was alert to sensitivities of a society to solve culture. the white man who is under development by opposing a black

man is but half free. one witness said he uplifted everyone's heart. the other speaker was william james. why was he chosen? key west a man about to go into washington's chief antagonist w. e. b. the boy appeared james was chosen to speak in part for his public reputation and in part because his younger brothers had served in the 54th suffering grave ones were so many men died. james wrote to washington and not spring using carefully respect.is a good judge of powers and oratory. he refers to washington. the casual slur marks washington invisibly coated and were protestant at the end of the

19th century. the distance between the liberal belief in universal freedom and equality and liberals cultural homogeneity and hierarchy was large. it's hard not to see washington as a mascot or liberal inclusivity in the wild praise for his speech which promised african-americans would cause no trouble tasseled the effort meet opposition as vocal displays the racial egalitarianism that did not exist at the event and ideas that foster became the basis for a future liberal culture in which practice came close to the theory in which belief in equality helped a society pursue its realization. writing the speech force james to specify what he took the meaning of america and civil war to be. undoubtedly understanding of the civil war what he called in the speech the profound meaning of the union cause. i was inherited from his liberal

contacts. so indeed may have been his way of talking about american religion and working together for their salvation yet because the occasion compelled him to think deeply about the meaning of the american creed and were shot and his comrades stand for and show us james brought a philosophical thinking about pluralism and the purpose ideals into his awareness of the wider social world around him. kids had always been an ambivalent american at-bats, but german culture and the american mountains in them come allergic to american accented english and eager to be liked by american farmers who lived around his summer home in new hampshire. charles napolitano and his taste for contemporary thought and affection for eccentrics and originals and multiple walks of life the diversity found in the united states. designated to speak on behalf of

liberal culture at the monument's commemoration he started thinking about the country in terms of cooperation across different than representing america as an ideal of equality that can shape behavior is powerfully as an indeterminate life. the heroism and 50 for it demonstrates the practical possibility of lead to quality. americans of all complexions and conditions can go for thought or others and meet that cheerfully and they shall not become a failure on earth. here's a line contributed by his wife alluding to the puritan idea of the new jerusalem like a city upon a hill so mayor ransom country james. like the city of the promised by forswearing there have been in the way for of the balkan nations belittled by flight. his uplifting message carried a warning. democracy is still upon his trial. no one can rest on the

accomplishments of the past. the sacrifice of shot in soldiers to be in vain unless today's americans have the courage to live by the same vision for which those men died. [applause] i didn't want to take up too much time with my own talking. i would love to hear if anybody has a question or comment or anything i can field. make. [inaudible] why not mention him a little more? >> i do spend a lot of time on commerce and and i appreciate the question. why did i not devote a whole chapter to understand? i'm pushing back against something which is &-ampersand was so huge and so massive that he had secured the history i

discovered. part of my own intellectual discovery process was i thought i would find the roots of this religion of democracy and the transcendentalists. i decided to go -- i had read his sermon on the golf culture. i knew i'd would find material that was important and that is when the bottom dropped out i had to go into the 18th century because the roots were actually there. the way emerson has affected our understanding almost like a block that trail. the bloodhounds of loose dissent because emerson had been there. i don't want to say he was dishonest because i don't tank he was deliberately dishonest. he presented himself as such a renegade, such a maverick, such a new thing under the sun but in fact he was absolutely a product

of the history that come before him and his leaving the church on grounds of conscience was a completely liberal thing to do because they are driven by conscience. i didn't want to devote a chapter to hand because i would have to do so much debunking of the latecomers and is already represented and i found his and was a much more descriptive character. the second chapter is about ralph waldo emerson maiden aunt who never married because she noticed in herself her nature was not destined to please and at that time the nature of marriage was -- that women have to submit their own wills to their has-beens. this thing about choice cultivating your own individual will is a christian act, a pious act. she did this very well and influence ralph waldo emerson.

between her i was able to do all the work and not. the ralph waldo emerson would've done for the narrative and in the later chapters i enabled to show how ethical culture leaders and others spent so much time reading emerson and drawing strength from our sand that it is evident those passages that had great resonance were in fact the products of his prior liberal culture. it's a great question. [inaudible] i'm curious if you see the ambivalence you see in james and the other liberal thinkers and how does that relate to their religious faith. >> so when you say ambivalent is that inconsistently --

>> i think that is what you were saying. >> so did the prior -- the thinkers before james had a similar ambivalence about america in the end there is no. yes and no. the prior yours like william ellery channing said the most advanced society on earth because it has a democratic form of of government because rick devoted to the principle all men are created equal announced implementation, getting rid of slavery and women right and so on. from channing's does there is no dissonance. the exception is john adams of all people because no question a revolutionary patriot, and men who loved the constitution and all those kinds of things.

he was also not an optimist. by the end of his life he was really depressed about the prospects of america because that's happened during his presidency the politics of dishonesty manipulation, and back room dealing and so one was so far from his conception of what america should be that he was despondent. it wasn't like jeans loving german culture, for example. john adams didn't have a substitute for america. he remains committed, but that helps describe it that about his legacy also has been so prideful and all of those things that he was proud of the accomplishment of his generation and he was afraid of scenic as longer. i think that counts as ambivalence. >> i haven't had a chance to

read your book yet and i look forward to it. i noticed at the beginning you had used the phrase moral agency and throughout the book you talk about that also. if apple we would call behavior or is that something else? >> that's a great question and i'm really glad you asked it because in part i'm fond of the term is diverted noticed moral agency. for a long time i wanted it in the subtitle of the book that i was afraid it would make sense to anyone but me. so it didn't belong there. but it is hugely important because one of the things for me that was so surprising was i was interested in a way of thinking about human difference that was universal, that could include all of human difference and that i found a christian origin specific and particular so there's a christian way of thinking and believing that

helped produce the universal way of thinking and believing and the moral agency has icons that originated in the christian context is a christian idea and became a universal idea over time. moral agency is not a term i coined. i tried to use the vocabulary of my historical actors and explain what they meant by the words used. moral agency comes in as a term in the 18th century. the agency part is about personal power, personal choice and moral is this thing that god would want you to do. to choose the moral path. the way these liberals at the 18th and 19th century thought about believe was you should have those beliefs that maximize your moral agency, that empower you to choose good over

evil truth over falsehood. so the christian path is simple for them. it is the pursuit of truth a knowledge and the pursuit of future. moral agency is something never individual possesses. that is the idea that god created people with the moral agency. it links to the christian concept of free will which goes back to saint augustine. of course he would choose to practice religious faith or invest in your religious faith. and then you consider policy measures on the basis of their effect on individual's moral agency. a couple of things it does change in our understanding, one is the role of government. for some people, the larger a government the more the

people's liberties are infringed between power and liberty. for these liberals there are some things the government could do that could protect. so that is one. and the second is to suspend the reason to use the most obvious example slavery should be abolished. there is a christian objection to slavery that is not only about the humanness of the slaves for apps only credited with humanity, but also about what is wrong with slavery is they've been robbed of their moral agency. their masters tell them what to do, therefore they don't get to choose what to do. therefore they don't get to exercise powers of personal choice in the pursuit of truth and goodness. morris agency is on the one hand a right to liberty, but it also gives you a duty to use liberty

in this particular way. it involves the use of reason considered a godly characteristic and conscience which makes everybody kerry and inborn chip of divinity, a hidden inner divinity and part of the practice of pluralism in the religion of democracy is remembering everyone has that. even when you are heating in a disagreement to remember they also bear some inner divinity that you don't have, therefore they have a preset is on the ultimate you don't have, therefore you shouldn't dehumanize them and run them over. you should maintain their respect for that quality or potential. moral agency that none is the thing everybody progresses. moral agent is what you are and what i am what everyone is an agent to make choices. does that help?

>> to expand on that if you will, please, would you say that moral agency is almost the opposite of exceptionalism? >> so, exceptionalism, like when i use the term exceptionalism i am often using it to talk about america. the earlier question about america being different from an better then. but are you talking about it almost as narcissism? >> yes. it seems more self-centered than the idea of agents to because agency implies pluralism. >> yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. i think you are right. i never thought of that way and that is helpful because it is a radical personal practice. it's not about legislating the people in any way. it is saved if you think in an

open-minded inclusive way you are going to be more humble. this is one of the things i talk about in the book. once you have the concept that every human being is a moral agent and that is the sacred thing about them then you're pursuit of virtue isn't don't kill, don't steal, don't lie. it is also how you interact with one another. the moral agent ideally is humble. it is humble because they have to remember my perspective is limited. i don't know the whole truth. i have to listen to others. at the same time they have to express their viewpoint honestly and sincerely otherwise involved in the public sphere for other people to interact with. the dialogue won't happen if you speak with this candor and

sincerity. they are the two social virtues that come from that i think of moral agency. >> i see that your book is scented with john adams and jane on a end starting with john adams at the beginning, his relationship with democracy was somewhat ambivalent sort of in the latest democrat if anything. leader of the federalist party deposed kind of the more ground up jeffersonian democrats. the word democracy among federalists was a bad word. so in his view of government was definitely not like common people make all the decisions. it's really a republican view. common people elect republican leaders who are virtuous and may make the disinterested

decisions. that is the decision that gets degraded. now i go over to the end and you have jane addams and before that the ethical culture. is there much more grounded in common people and it's sort of a very different concept of democracy. i think a lot more pluralistic because half times the size of the of the massachusetts constitution which is state-supported religion. my question to you is that this represents a thread you are making through the increasing evolution of what constitutes democracy? >> yes. and we may disagree on some points. yes indeed the federalists were opposed to the democratic republicans but i don't think lowercase democracy was for john adams at all.

said this is one of the ideas in american history that i'm pushing back against. the idea that the federalists were conservatives. it's problematic for me always. it's funny because these are people who call themselves liberals. happen to be the case they call themselves liberals at that time but it had nothing to do with politics. it had instead to do with religion. said that yes is there is change over time. so this is not a static history. i'm not finding something constant across american culture because that is exactly the change that happened is that jane addams is almost like a radical democrat in that sense if she is really going to listen to different people's viewpoints. it is not just the common people, immigrants and workers who lived around whole house. she's listening to the

industrialist and having conversations with george pullman. of course she's getting them to the point of view of workers but also his point of view. in a way jane addams seems like the most realize carrots air from an historical data. what she believed in practice with consistent with ideas john adams had that was the biggest shock to find sometimes in the writings i would find jane adams writing things almost verbatim things that john adams had written. a little bit different. i think there was a cultural continuity but had to do at the ethic of moral agency, but then it is a slow unspooling at the implication of this idea. on the matter of voting will go to william henry channing. this is the rise of the democratic party and brad voting so you have universal white male

suffrage. and now they are waived because the federalist party is over. they don't think most people should vote. that is because they are afraid of what happens, which is the democratic party do what they wanted. so they instead wanted them to be educated. it is no coincidence that all the common school movement develops read about the tenets universal white male suffrage. these immigrants will become voters who may need to be educated. the democratic portion is in the sacredness of each individual. the mechanics of who should go or not obviously have to get debated and hammered out over time. john adams, you called an elitist. i meant to say this. when elections to tocqueville came to visit he said to

tocqueville -- i would no sooner want to work in and devote them a 10-year-old. that is elitist am thinking that a labour would not have the capacity to exercise the kind of governance. and at the same time, when he delivered his address, et cetera rightfully belong to the greek fraternity of working men. he is putting himself on par with the workers, which is pretty radical for a rich guy to do. on the other hand maybe he's a hypocrite. he is so out of touch he doesn't realize that never having worked a day in your life has consequences and makes you not know your audience very well. at the exact same time working men really like that speech. it's really one of those things that looks different. to me it looks different from there and i don't think the democratic republicans were advocating exactly ground-up

democracy. slaveholders swear. >> actually what i was referring to most because i'm much more familiar with washington and adams and washington was what upset with how the democratic republic in society which a century later would be called ethical culture society where people get together and the common people are basically talking politics and caucusing around issues that affect them in trying to make the right choices. they are outside of government and that trip to washington with the denigration of what government was because they were usurping the role of government and the people who should be talking about the issues in making those decisions will be elected leaders. i'm not familiar enough to know if he shared washington's views altogether. >> what it illustrates so well

is the whole concept of a party is it liberal. from this definition. you already know washington said we shouldn't have action since no one. the federalists happens because people are human. so you can generalize about all federalists. writer john adams get attacked from within the federalist party. so the parties. coming here again we can bring back emerson, ralph waldo emerson who wouldn't to clear himself a novel lushness. opposition to slavery was the most popular reform in his mill you. he wouldn't even declare himself that because being under a label and letting the label to the work of thinking has moral agency, undermines the power to think for yourself. this is about intellectual dependence thinking for

yourself by doing that with some humility. john adams is quite short on humility. he wanted to be humble. but he never made it. thank you for coming. [applause] >> i am certain amy will stay long enough to sign any books you have for her to sign. those are available at the counter. thank you very much for your thoughts.

>> michael morell is next on