From Sky news this is connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

Our connection this hour was made one year ago this week when Donald Trump announced a new business venture.

He was selling Bibles.

Here's how the Associated Press reported, quote, Donald Trump is now selling Bibles as he runs to return to the white House.

Trump is urging supporters to buy the God Bless the U.S.A. Bible, which is inspired by country singer Lee Greenwood's patriotic ballad.

Trump takes the stage to the song at each of his rallies, and his appeared with Greenwood at events.

Trump directed supporters to a website selling the Bible for $59.99, end quote.

On his social media, Trump said that every American needs a Bible in their house and his Bible was the best.

He posted, quote, Happy Holy Week.

Let's make America pray again.

As we lead into Good Friday and Easter, I encourage you to get a copy of the God Bless the USA Bible and quote this story.

And this particular American moment might feel unprecedented.

In some ways.

It undeniably is in others, it is rooted in American tradition.

Trump has said he was running to bring back a Christian voice to the white House, that he loves Christians and Christian values, and his political opponents are not reliable Christians.

This is a political tactic that literally goes back centuries in this country.

Historian Doctor Spencer McBride says that religion is regularly used as a political or cultural cudgel.

Politicians claim the mantle of godliness while also claiming that their opponents are devoid of faith.

McBride notes that the culture wars of the 1800s focused on perhaps the abolition of slavery and religion's role in society.

Today, the culture wars often focus on LGBTQ rights, among others, but there are certainly some similarities.

McBride is the author of several books, including, By the way, a book about Western New York's religious and social upheaval from roughly 1790 to 1860.

The term that was new to me, the Burn Dover District.

And as I read about it, some sources said, well, you know, there was a lot of religious revival happening.

And burned over because there was this religious fire and this passion in Western New York from that, what we would call the state line now all the way toward Syracuse and east.

And there were also other sources saying that it was a burned over district because people were burned out from religious huckster ism.

So there's a lot to talk about here about our own history and how it might relate to some of what we are feeling hearing today.

Doctor McBride is participating tonight in an event as a guest of the Rochester Historical Society.

But first, he is our guest here.

He's a historian, author, podcaster, and associate managing historian of the Joseph Smith Papers Project.

Spencer, welcome.

Thank you for taking time for connections.

Oh, it's great to be with you.

And welcome in studio doctor Michael Hubbard.

Michael is a distinguished professor of history at Suny Geneseo.

And it's great to see you back in studio.

Nothing's going on.

Kind of a placid time in history.

Yeah.

Thanks.

It's nice to be back, Evan.

In a strange sort of way.

Yeah.

And you said before the program that this is an effort to to slowly revive what the Rochester Historical Society is doing, that Covid, like many other things, took a dent out of this.

So what's going on?

Well, the Rochester Historical Society has been around for 150 years.

It's had various locations around the city.

it was dormant for a few years during the Covid era.

and it would struggle during those years.

What we're doing is, is working to, put things together.

We've put together a partnership between the arts, the Rochester Historical Society, Landmark Society of Western New York, Causeway of Community Partners and the City of Rochester and the Rochester Area Foundation to to right the ship and stop the bleeding and get this organization moving again.

We've also worked with a professional collections consultant to evaluate what we have at our, storage facility, which is at 1100 University Avenue.

And we're we're looking to revitalize an organization that has been dormant for a long time.

And doctor McBride is is generously coming to speak with us virtually tonight all the way from Utah.

But if this is part of an effort to bring this organization back together, which is it's an amazing thing we have we have over 200,000 items in the collection.

Stuff from Susan B Anthony from, Frederick Douglass from Nathaniel Rochester.

It's an amazing collection.

We hope to get the word out and generate interest.

If you want to attend tonight's virtual event, 7 p.m. will have a link and information in our show notes that you can access and they would love for you to be a part of it, you know?

and we're not going to, we're not going to be talking overtly about politics, although everything seems to cross over.

but I will say, you know, preparing for today's program, I watched a number of events that doctor McBride has done.

He's a he's a really dynamic speaker.

we're going to talk about a lot of things in history that I was not even aware of.

I do think, Michael, this is an interesting time to see if people will reengage with their local history, because you and I have talked about civic illiteracy, and that's knowing basic civics.

How would you do compared to how immigrants do on civics test?

They do very well, obviously.

but it's also because, that civic literacy has a possible price and it feels, perhaps now more than ever, it's valuable to reengage with history that far.

Oh, absolutely.

As we watch, and constitutional illiteracy as well as we watch, Congress sort of, abandoned article one, article one of the Constitution, article one, section eight of the Constitution almost entirely.

I think it's important.

And look, you know, I mean, I think I, I firmly believe this, Evan, that everyone likes history.

They may have had horrible history teachers that soured on them.

But once you show them that their story matters, that they are a force in history, they will be intrigued.

I've been I've been a professor for 31 years, and so I'm pretty hard to impress in some ways.

And I get in the Rochester Historical Society thing and it's like, Holy cow, there's so much cool stuff to look at.

It's amazing what the collections are.

We've got documents.

We've got, stuff.

It's just fantastic.

And I think anyone who walks in the door will really be impressed.

So I absolutely get involved with your local story in New York is the one of two states in the country that requires every municipality to have a government appointed historian.

There is history all over the state.

we all benefit from knowing it.

Before we dive in on the burned over district with Spencer, I'm going to ask Michael and Spencer this question, and I'll start with you.

Michael, you're in studio with us, and then we'll kick it over to doctor McBride.

You more than most of the guests I've had on this program over the years, have been really sanguine about students.

You are.

You don't really, have a lot of patience for people who bash young adults.

you defend them as curious as interested in the world, as capable of more than a lot of cynical adults give them credit for.

do you still feel that way?

And do you feel that there is a willingness to engage with history right now, or do you feel that there is, a disconnect?

No.

They absolutely want to engage with history.

they want to engage with everything.

I mean, I think that and God knows, look at my generation.

What if we've watched the place start catch fire and not do a whole lot about it?

I have a lot of hope, a lot of faith in the students.

They are interested in history.

They are engaged.

And, I think we are really going to need them to dig us out of the hole we're currently in.

Spencer, how do you feel about, the way that Americans, especially younger Americans, are engaging with history?

Do you think there's a disconnect or a fire for for more knowledge here?

Yeah, I, I agree with Michael.

my students at Brigham Young University, for instance, if you can show the relevance of the past and teach the past accurately, it's amazing the questions that just naturally become elicited from lectures and discussions.

And what does my professor heart so good is when they send me emails or stay after class to discuss the things we talked about, not to prepare for an exam, but because they're genuinely interested and they're genuinely trying to understand how the world they inherited came to be the way that it is.

you know, Spencer, Michael and I have had conversations about the way that what is taught is a choice, and there are different pressures on what is taught or what is not allowed to be taught.

And the way that sometimes, in the culture wars, which we're going to talk a lot about the history of the culture wars in this country this hour, the culture wars are making these allegations that, well, professors are just trying to shape students and trying to tell students what to think.

And Michael has defended the work of historians and professors, is trying to help students learn how to think, but not telling them what to think.

What do you make of that distinction?

Yeah, I use the same distinction in my lessons with my students.

And in fact, throughout a semester, we have several response papers that they write and discussions that we have.

And the question is always open ended, and there is no right answer.

And I tell them, I'm not grading you on your opinion.

I'm grading you on your ability to engage with the reading and articulate, a smart, informed, factual argument.

And, and I think that really resonates with the students because they realize, oh, I don't have to agree with the professor to get a good grade.

I just have to read the assignment and make a smart, well-articulated argument.

And that's really what we're asking of our students, isn't to think like we do, but to think and to think.

Well, is there any evidence that anybody before Donald Trump tried to sell a Bible for 60 bucks?

Spencer, I haven't been able to find any evidence that I felt like that was a first.

I can't think of any president who has done that before.

That was a wild one.

However, you know, it would be incorrect to assume that religion is not used as a political cudgel, as a cultural cudgel.

And I want you to start with a definition.

When we hear the burn, Dover District.

you know, I look at maps and, and, have done some work reading through some of what you and your colleague put together for a book of collected documents, in our country's history, where is the burned over district and what does it actually mean to you, Spencer?

So the burned over district is a time and a place.

It's, Western New York generally considered the counties west of the Catskills and Adirondacks, between 1790 and 1860.

Now there's blurring of those dates and there's blurring of those of those, geographies.

It's not like religious revivalism hit the Pennsylvania line and said, oh, we can't go across this border.

but there's something happening in New York in the early 1800s.

Its population is booming.

between 1800 and 1820, some 800,000 New Englanders migrate to western New York for the cheap land, and their family sends behind them missionaries because they're concerned about these people's, religious beliefs.

They're concerned about their their souls.

And what ultimately happens is you have this series of revivals, and many of these New Englanders turned New Yorkers for the first time in their lives, are considering what religious tradition do I want to follow?

I've moved away from home.

I've moved away from the traditions of New England.

I can choose my religious path.

And so you get this boom in church membership, but you also get this, boom.

And the number of religious options, the number of religious denominations competing for converts.

And so it's a time of social change that translates to, a spike in church membership and burned over is a phrase that means what specifically do you.

Yeah.

So so as you mentioned in your introduction, it can mean different things to different people.

When Charles Finney, this famous revivalist, comes to Oneida County, he actually uses the term the burnt district, and he uses it in that very negative way, meaning there's been so much religious revivalism that these people don't want to be preached at anymore.

They are sick and tired of religion.

Now, of course, it comes in waves and eventually, Finney is very successful in, in his revivalism in western New York.

for many, though, it's this idea that almost of slash and burn agriculture.

You would burn the field so that the field would come back, more vibrant.

And and we see in the wake of this religious revival, revivalism, a high concentration of social reform movements.

So in the wake of the revivalism, you see a high concentration of religious rights advocacy.

I'm sorry, I should say, of women's rights advocacy.

You see, a large concentration of anti-slavery advocacy.

New York becomes the hotbed not only of religious revivalism, but of social reform that I mean, that's very interesting to me because I think that may go run counter a little bit to expectation, although, I mean, I spent a little time going down the rabbit hole on someone like Charles Grandison Finney, and I realized, I don't think I understand the various strains that he was competing against here.

So there was probably a lot of competition in the realm of social ideas, and how different flavors and strains of religion addressed women's issues, slavery, etc., is that fair?

Yeah.

And you'd see in these revivals that the revivals were seen by many, as in favor of women's rights, women were allowed to speak in many of these revival meetings in ways that they were not allowed to preach in traditional church settings.

And so for many women, they saw revivals as a step forward, but they also saw it as a limited step forward.

There were many women, such as, the grim case sisters, who were famous advocates for women's suffrage, who said this is a token.

They're essentially letting us preach in these revival meetings, but they won't let us be ordained as ministers.

They won't let us lead congregations.

And so in the same breath that they would celebrate the progress of women's rights through revivalism, they would also indicate its limitations, that it wasn't enough, it wasn't far enough.

And the same thing with slavery.

With slavery, you have all these people becoming more religious, and for a good number of them, this opens their eyes to the sin of slavery, that it is a sin to treat another human as property.

But then these same people were dismayed when a good portion of their congregations did not see it in the same light.

They they didn't know how they could worship in the same chapel with people who were okay with slavery.

And so it's fascinating.

Revivalism brought, more it awakened the social conscience of many of the converts, but also led to schisms because it awakened that social conscience.

Conscience, unevenly.

I already have an email from Pat who wants to know about where was the separation of church and state coming in with this?

This may be a concept that I think is at least I feel like I've probably at times invoked it inaccurately.

Or maybe historians pull their hair out about the notion of church and state.

And, do you want to talk a little bit about that, Spencer?

So Pat wants to know, everything you're talking about with the burned over district, where was the separation of church and state?

Yes.

So the the First Amendment guarantees that that the federal government will make no law concerning religion, and that there would be no officially established federal or state sponsored church at the federal level.

However, up until 1833, there were states that had, established churches, meaning they were sponsored in part or paid for in part by tax dollars, that there were certain rules of civil rights tied to membership in those churches.

Massachusetts is the last to get rid of its state sponsor church.

And so this idea of what religious freedom is in terms of the Constitution and what it is in terms of the lived, everyday experience of Americans, is in a is in a shifting place.

In the early 1800s, people seem to be fine with invoking religion in politics, to an extent, and usually only in as much as the person doing so agrees with you politically.

but it's different than having kind of the formerly established churches that are, being funded by tax dollars and civil rights, such as holding office and voting, being tied to church membership.

So so if it seems a little fuzzy, it's because it is.

Americans are still working out at this time what exactly that looks like?

Professor Oberg, you want to weigh in on all the separation of church and state as a concept?

I think doctor McBride did a nice job.

It's it's murky.

You you can see during this period debates in Congress about, you know, the Sunday mails, whether the mail be delivered on Sunday, you can see, a missionary impulse driving a lot of federal Indian policy, right, that that we, we, we, we, the United States need to Christianize and civilize indigenous, you know, an indigenous people.

And then there was these these, islands of holiness and these religious groups that are that are forming and taking shape across New York State and many of them, I came to see that politics was necessary to secure the kinds of social and moral changes that they wanted to see in American society.

So it is murky.

It is messy.

And I think that for for some reason, that's what makes it such an exciting and interesting period to teach and talk about.

we're talking to Michael Oberg and Spencer Spencer McBride.

Doctor Oberg and Doctor McBride are both historians, and Spencer is part of an event tonight with the Rochester Historical Society at 7 p.m..

Doctor Oberg is helping lead a revival of sorts.

Revival is the word of the hour here.

And the Rochester Historical Society has, as Michael was saying earlier this hour, a lot of wonderful history in the form of literally objects, documentation, stuff that that denotes regional history.

And it was kind of dormant for a bit.

the pandemic had something to do with that.

But the society is trying to bring in historians like doctor McBride and others to do these events, some virtual to engage with the public and to hopefully spark a fire of interest in our own local, regional and national history.

So that event is 7:00 tonight.

We'll take more of your questions and comments if you have them via email connections@sky.org connections@sky.org.

I want to read from a little bit of, the book that Spencer, you know, you know, do you say you and your colleague, edited the burned over district book?

because you collected a lot of historical documents for the book.

Spencer is that the.

I was going to say you wrote the book.

What's the right way to describe this for you?

Yeah, it's a little bit of both.

so, so essentially, we tried to tell the story of New York's burned over district.

Why did all this religious revivalism happen here when it did, through the words and perspective of the women and men who were part of it.

So we wanted to take historical records and present them to, readers.

And that meant the writing portion for my coauthor.

Jennifer Dorsey.

And I was to essentially right around the documents to introduce them and to curate the documents in such a way that it told the story that we hoped our readers would get.

I want to read a little bit from your section, on Charles Grandison Finney.

In 1835, Finney published Lectures on Revival of Religion.

That's a book that argued for the efficacy of religious revivals and functioned as an instruction manual for planning religious revivals and here are some of his words.

Quote.

This is 1835.

Men are so spiritually sluggish.

There are so many things to lead their minds off from religion, and to oppose the influence of the gospel, that it is necessary to raise an excitement among them, till the tide rises so high as to sweep away the opposing obstacles, they must be so excited that they will break over these counteracting influences before they will obey God.

Not that excited feeling is religion, for it is not.

But it is excited desire, appetite and feeling that prevents religion.

The will is in a sense enslaved by the carnal and worldly desires.

Hence, it is necessary to awaken men to a sense of guilt and danger, and thus produce an excitement of counter feeling and desire which will break the power of carnal and worldly desire, and leave the will free to obey God.

End quote.

What do you hear in those words, Spencer?

That that Charles Finney likes to preach in the most fiery, sensational way imaginable.

I feel like I there's part of me that thinks we might hear that kind of same kind of preaching today in some quarters.

Am I wrong?

I mean, you you absolutely do.

And the problem Finney is addressing isn't new.

Theologians for a long time have lamented that religious conversion is hard to come by in the first place, but it's also hard to maintain.

How do you maintain religious devotion over a long life?

Most women and men then, and now, if they are religious, kind of go through periods of high activity in their churches to low or no activity in their churches, and that's that's not new.

What Finney was really saying, though, is if we want to revive their religious feelings, we have to preach in such a fashion that gets their attention and that in many ways, scare scares them.

It's exactly.

Yeah, I mean, I so I hear two different ideas.

I mean, one is the straightforward idea of the need for something to wake men up.

And Finney was worried about men in particular.

The second is a bit darker.

It feels manipulative.

It is necessary to awaken men to a sense of guilt and danger, hoping that will motivate them to act.

Is it wrong for me to see a kind of a dark manipulation?

There am, I, am, I, am I putting too much of a 2025 lens on that?

It's not wrong at all.

In fact, Finney had his critics in his time who chastise him for his speaking style.

They may not have used the term manipulative, but they were kind of getting at that, that this isn't the religion, this isn't the style of religion we should be practicing.

but of course, Finney was in many ways the inheritor of, similar preachers from the colonial period, men like Jonathan Edwards that kind of had this, idea that you scare people with, with fiery sermons such as sinners in the hands of an Angry God.

it's so it's always been controversial.

Finney's methods weren't necessarily entirely new.

but the controversy that attended them was just as old as the his predecessors in that style.

Douglas and Rochester.

I'll take your phone call just a second.

Let me ask Professor Oberg.

What do you hear in that passage there?

How does it hit your ears?

Yeah, I was thinking of of, the Jonathan Edwards centers in the hands of an angry God, too.

And the the loathsome spiders hanging over the pits of hell and that kind of language.

I mean, I think if you know.

And I'll defer to doctor McBride on this, but my memory is Finney and others like him were looking at these.

Not only this.

This population grew up with these rapidly changing societies.

You've got the canal coming through.

You've got rates of alcohol consumption in in that period in American history that were extraordinarily high and all the attending problems that came with that.

So there's a temperance movement in that.

But there were genuine problems that a Christian like Finney could see literally right in front of him.

And that probably accounts for some of the urgency and his tone.

Fair.

Doctor McBride.

Yeah.

And I would add to that, there was from the, the congregation's perspective, there was so much uncertainty in this new country.

Economies were shifting.

many people were moving to New York simply because they could not afford land where their families had lived for generations before.

So there is so much uncertainty in the political system and the economic system that Finney is scaring people in many ways into conversion.

But he's also kind of channeling into a fear that already exists, if that makes sense.

And so for, you know, people looked at it and they said at that time, this is wrong.

And there were many that said, hey, but it leads people to join a church.

Therefore the means justify the the ends.

and that debate continues with this style of preaching, even, even in our own time.

I was listening this weekend to Ross Douthat, a New York Times columnist.

He's written a number of books on his own Catholicism and religion.

He was debating Michael Shermer from Reason magazine and Michael Shermer taking up the case for No God and or the no need for religious affiliation, Ross Douthat encouraging religious affiliation.

This was for the Free Press.

Barry Weiss, his organization hosted this debate, and Ross Douthat was saying, you know, look around, there's drug addiction.

I mean, you think about the temperance movement that Mike was talking about the concern about alcohol abuse in the 1830s.

Douthat almost 200 years later, is saying, look at the drug use.

Look at the lack of connection that people have to anything that ties them to place to community.

And that is enough to say there's a value for going back to church.

And Douthat was also, I think, making the point that the New Atheist, in his words, failed.

He said, 20 years ago, Hitchens and Dawkins and their types were ascendant in the culture and media, and, you know, he thinks they failed.

Now, Michael Shermer came back and said, church attendance is, you know, it's kind of plateaued a little bit.

It has been going down, down, down.

And, Shermer says we don't need, in his words, you know, a man in the sky to tell us how to guide us even if we recognize the problems.

I hear Finian doubts it there.

Spencer, do you?

I think to an extent, What?

The second Great Awakening, which is this national movement that the burned over district as a part of is responding to in part, was a rationalization of religion that in the revolutionary period, you had men like Jefferson and Franklin who believed in God but took a much more rational approach to religion.

They had much more skepticism, where the occurrence of miracles, for example, was concerned and so for Finney and others, they see American religion as having become too rational that it had almost lost, a mysterious and, miracle wielding god.

And so he was trying to bring that component back to it.

And so, yeah, it may not be the same thing in the way that it's the choice between atheism and religion.

But you do see debates within religion and how rational a religious faith should be.

That's very much what Finney was involved with.

That's just a slice of the book, by the way.

Let me grab Douglas, and Rochester has been waiting to jump in.

Hey, Douglas, go ahead.

Oh, it's been very interesting listening to this.

And, I'm interested in the psychology of why people would leave where they were in New England to come through, except for what happened in New York.

people like Frederick Douglas, of course, found he could amplify his voice better in Rochester.

That if he had stayed in Boston.

But how about the adherents?

the many members of all of these various social movements?

there was a personal psychology of dissatisfaction with everything.

They were surrounded by.

is that have you been able to identify that?

And if they were the religious revival in Northampton, Massachusetts, that worked for a while.

But, you know, they stay.

They didn't stay there.

They went on to central western New York.

And look what has been identified, is the cycle ology as to why people left New England, came to central western New York and joined this movement.

Douglas.

Thank you.

Spencer.

Yeah, it's a great question.

it's complicated, but the short answer I'd give is there's a level of excitement and desperation going on.

New Western New York, in particular, is offering very inexpensive land.

Now, of course, this wasn't empty land.

This is the traditional homeland of the Haudenosaunee peoples.

but following several treaties that were forcing these indigenous peoples off their land, white settlers became very attracted to Western New York because of the low cost.

But there was also, limited economic opportunity in places such as New England, as inheritances had been split and split and split over the generations.

And then you had another component.

You have natural, disasters.

So in 1816, for, for example, there was what was known as the Year without a Summer.

A volcano in Southeast Asia erupted and spewed so much ash into Earth's atmosphere that it disrupted weather patterns throughout the world.

And in places such as Vermont and New Hampshire, you had snow in June, you had ice on the ponds in late June, and this led to massive crop failure.

And to many people, this forced them to abandon their farms, abandon their homes and try to start again.

And western New York was the place to do it.

And for example, this story of the Year without a Summer is what leaves.

That leads a certain family, the Smith family, to migrate to Western New York.

And that's, of course, the family that Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, was a part of.

So it's a push and pull, cheap land, limited opportunities, natural disasters.

Douglas, anything to add there?

That's, the economic aspect is, easy to grasp.

but I was interested.

It just seems the people were just inherently dissatisfied people.

They were inherently rebels.

And of course, that, concept of rebellion dates back to before the American Revolution.

But it does seem that these people were searching, searching, searching for meaning in their life that they were not having where they were living in New England.

They wanted, an open, receptivity that they had an open receptivity to some idea that could, satisfy themselves.

And it just seemed like it's a lot of dissatisfied people that live couldn't stay in Northampton or the terribly that kept moving west.

and, you know, you can expand it beyond the Jackson Turner all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

But, within New York State, just it just seemed they were going to be dissatisfied.

They were searching for life answers.

And the various movements gave those life answers for a while.

But, I was just interested in that, interplay of personal psychology with the group movements.

Okay.

Thank you.

Douglas.

Doctor McBride.

Yeah.

And I think you're right.

And I think you raised a really good point.

It's something I'm going to think a lot more about.

my instant reaction would be, did this psychological openness of the population lead to the migration to New York, or did some of it come after the migration to New York that once they're away from their home communities, they look like a like a child leaving home and going to college for the first time?

Often a whole new world of ideas is presented to them.

So and the answer is probably a little bit of both, but it's something I'm going to think about a lot based on your question.

Douglas.

Thank you.

Before we go to break here, I want to say I've got, some emails I'm going to read after the break.

The event tonight, 7 p.m..

It's a virtual event with Doctor Spencer McBride, our guest, who is a historian, author, podcaster, associate managing historian of the Joseph Smith Papers Project.

He just mentioned Joseph Smith.

He's written a lot about Joseph Smith's run for president, which a lot of people, in fact, when he lectures at BYU, he often, he often finds people who are surprised to hear the justice that ran for president.

We'll squeeze in a little bit of that after our break.

But Doctor Oberg, before we go to break here, you know, Douglas, questions I think are really interesting about the psychology of what was happening around the time.

You often talk about why knowing your history matters.

Why does the history of the burned over district matter so much?

I think it explains certainly the character of New York.

Right.

The nature of, the way communities developed here, the, the dispossession of indigenous peoples, the building, the canal, which is part of the story, is fundamental not only to New York history, but to the history of the entire country.

and then just sort of explaining the the religious diversity across the country.

Right.

Seventh day Adventists, Mormonism.

lots of smaller groups.

Unitarianism, they all have their, these ties to, to Central New York, that if you want to understand the religious landscape of this still very religious country, but by in comparison to other countries, I think you need to understand that the sorts of groups that got their start up in in the northeast and in this burned over district, let's take this only break, and we'll come right back to your feedback for our guests on connections.

I'm Evan Dawson Tuesday on the next connections, the former U.S. ambassador to Qatar joins us to discuss the value of diplomacy in 2025.

We'll talk with her about the strategic relationship that the United States has with states and nations in the Middle East, and what's happening right now in our second hour, what have you heard about that so-called city killer asteroid that's coming in eight years?

We'll talk to astrophysicists about our future in space.

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This is connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

We've been talking about the writing of our guest, doctor Spencer McBride, who's a historian.

Cornell University Press.

You were saying?

Michael?

Yes.

A little shout out to them.

Yeah, the burned out, burned over district.

the book hosted by Doctor Pride, is available at Cornell University Press.

so get a copy of it.

It's it's a fun read.

I mean, some of the documents, some of the ideas that are bouncing around these pages, they they are interesting in their own right.

They're interesting in their resonance with, some of the discussions we hear today in terms of tone.

But also they're important just because we're still still dealing with a question how to make a more perfect union.

And that is something we share with a lot of these people who were speaking during the, first three quarters of the 19th century and in Western New York.

So I think that there's a lot to be learned by, by engaging with these documents.

And in the spirit of revival, this is your chance.

Here it is my chance.

Like the Rochester Stork site, we are open to the public limited hours, but we're open Monday and Tuesday, 9 to 3.

Our archivist and librarian, William Keeler, can answer all your collection, all your questions about the collection we have.

And we hope that all of you out there listening will consider becoming members of the Rochester Historical Society, which you can do on our website, which is Rochester history.org.

We are also, if you especially want, want, want to get involved.

We are also looking for board members who who can I think help us create a historical society, an association that represents the history of this community in all its breadth and all its diversity.

Rochester history.org Rochester history.org.

If there was ever a time to spark an interest in civic literacy and American history in all its forms, I would think it would be now.

So a lot more to learn there.

And if you want to learn more, by all means do it.

I think there's you mentioned there's two active, there's one active Facebook pages and two there's like there's a zombie Facebook page as well.

my my colleague on the board of trustees, Bob Scheidt, has been working with, with meta to try to solve this problem.

And it's quite a problem to, to the the previous Facebook page is, is is out of reach to us in terms of passwords.

So we've started a new one so you can find us on Facebook.

And we're the one that seems to be active right now.

All right.

Patrick emails to say, how about the socio economics of revivalism was there a certain type of person that these preachers like Finney were after, or was it come all faithful?

Spencer it was definitely the latter come off faithful.

and you see this effect of religious revivalism hit people of all economic classes.

However, you will see its effect especially poignant among many people in the lower economic classes.

but in particular, you see, in the lower economic classes, maybe a greater openness for not just changing religious tradition, but for these new religious movements that grow out of this revivalism and out of this, burned over district.

I'm thinking of, Shaker ism, which which predates the revivalism.

But but the shakers were very prominent, in western New York.

You see it with the rise of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints, or Mormons, as its adherents were known.

you see it with later on, the Oneida perfectionist.

And so it was never purely class revivalism attracted people of all classes.

But you do see people who feel like the system just doesn't work for them very well or hasn't worked very well for them.

These are the people who tend to be more open to what we might see as radical solutions, or major departures from the status quo.

let me get, Roger here.

So Roger says Lilydale is a remnant of the burned Dover district.

Ironically, it is often picketed by conservative religious folks who consider the residents as devil worshipers.

I think it's a wonderful place for spiritual connection.

That's from Roger.

If you haven't done a Lilydale, it is toward James Town.

It's, western New York, and it is a place where people like I've got neighbors who love to go and, you know, they get psychic readings and things like that.

And, I don't want to minimize it.

I have not been myself, but, Spencer, are you familiar with Lilydale?

I am, and some colleagues of mine recently published a book, also with Cornell University Press that tells both the history of Lilydale but also its continued presence in American society.

Why do people still go to Lilydale?

It's called Spiritualism Place, and it's an excellent, way of both understanding the history and the continuity of Lilydale and spiritualism.

The Fox Sisters will never die.

anything you want to add in Lilydale, Michael?

I read about it.

I learned about it in your in your book.

Spencer.

I hadn't hadn't known about it.

So I think it's it's just fascinating.

The the Fox sisters did pass through Geneseo on one of their trips and so they do have local history questions here.

I got a question for you.

this is an era when there's also lots of Irish immigration coming into the United States.

More towards the end of the period.

You're interested in how how do Catholics fit into this story?

Yeah.

So so Catholics presence, the presence of Catholicism in western New York is growing throughout this time period.

it doesn't get the same attention as Methodism and and the Baptist, because the growth isn't quite as exponential as what is going on.

But it's certainly happening.

And New York is this very interesting place.

You can look at certain documents and you see, how progressive some people in western New York were, how inclusive they were of people of different faiths, Protestants being okay with their Catholic neighbors and vice versa.

you had a Protestant congregation led by a free person of color in Wayne County, New York, during the 1830s.

This was extremely unusual in American society at this time.

So in some in some documents, you see this, progressiveness, yet in the same neighborhoods, at the same time, you see people, falling back into some of the same disagreements that have been with Christianity for centuries, Protestants versus Catholics.

And certainly, as you get into the later 1800s, the anti-immigration stances that would characterize many of the cities on the East Coast, those were certainly present in Western New York as well.

Answer your question.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

by the way, you should host the show when I'm gone.

Here.

Do you want to host it sometime?

I don't know what you do with all the the things.

There's a lot of buttons.

There's too many buttons.

It's too many buttons.

In fact, we're trying to corral a lot of feedback because there's a lot of interest, which means there should be a lot of interest in tonight's event at 7 p.m. and in Rochester history.

Reorg is the website, right?

Edgar in Naples says with the burned over district, I like to make the contemporary connection of social reform with the with our areas civil disobedience and the passion for the cause or issue.

Most recently, it was resistance to fracked gas storage on Seneca Lake, Seneca meadows landfill and Bitcoin mining in Dresden.

Historically, the women's peace encampment in Seneca Falls, the list is growing.

That's from Edgar and Naples.

Fair connection, Michael I think so.

I mean, what I'd like to do and I don't know if you know this, but there's the Frederick Douglass.

what's the American slave?

It's the 4th of July speech was given in Rochester by Susan B Anthony, which was obviously here.

Her sister as well.

And they are raising issues that we we have yet to successfully address.

Right.

And I think that this continuing I love to when I, when I teach to look at reform as a continuum.

Right.

We're constantly different groups coming together to try to make the country is conform to their expectation of a more perfect union.

And what you see throughout American history are groups of citizens coming together to push governments to do what those groups of citizens think is the right moral or just thing.

It doesn't happen without citizens getting involved.

And so this may be a lesson for our own time too, right?

When, when, when the government goes astray or when the policies are such that we, you know, certainly I don't like now it's on us to start protesting, especially when when Congress has shown that it is so feckless and unwilling to engage in a meaningful way.

Oh, I mean, a brief bit of history that I've been kind of going back over, not the least of which is because my son's been reading about it.

But article one was Congress for a reason, for first among equals, the importance of, of I mean, I of all people I was reading conservative historian Yuval Levin recently who was saying we talk about the the separation of powers as if, well, it's equal, you know, a third, a third or a third, and, you know, you've got a third of this power, and I've got a third of this power, and that's not the way it goes.

He says the separation of powers mean there are some duties that are not yours.

They are my branches.

And there are some duties that are not mine.

They're your branches, and you are not supposed to be able to tell Congress if you're the president.

No, I'm not going to spend the money that you disbursed that you have.

The function is Congress to control this.

And when you give it up willingly, then you do concentrate the power in the executive and you participate in an imbalance of power.

What do you think, Michael?

Well, I think that this is probably we have like a few minutes left.

This is probably going to come back sometime.

When we come back a week long seminar.

This could start a fight in an empty bar.

but it's just.

Yeah, I mean, I think you see Congress not doing its job and presidents governing by executive order because there are no laws being passed and Congress is, is is is I think it's a failure in many ways.

And it needs to pick up its game a little bit, a lot.

And I think we've seen presidents from both parties governing by executive order.

And it's deeply, deeply unfortunate because you see the president doing things that are clearly violations of the Constitution.

It wasn't supposed to be this way with Congress, with with leaders in Congress saying, well, the president should have whatever, cabinet he wants and the president should have whatever budget he wants, as if they have no role.

Right.

That was not the way it was.

So no, it's not it's it's advise and consent.

And this is why reading the Constitution, supporting, constitutional literacy is important.

Reading The Federalist is important.

Reading the Anti-Federalist papers and writings is important.

This kind of stuff is.

We've had this conversation many times.

It's it's absolutely essential to the functioning republic.

But also it's just knowing knowing the history, knowing, you know, where did seventh day Adventists come from?

what is the origin story of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints?

Why?

Why is there a you know, why?

Why are there, you know why.

What?

You know, books like the burned over district.

Why was Rochester at the center of this reform activity?

Why we're Mayor Susan B Anthony and Mary Anthony making their stand here on so many issues.

Just understanding where you are in place and time is so valuable in a society that doesn't place any, doesn't seem to place a proper premium on those kinds of of knowledge, skills and if you know, there are folks that like to say, well, the founders or this founders want that one thing the founders believed very, very strongly was in citizenship in that in the sense that they define citizen at times quite narrowly, but they believe that citizens needed to be engaged, they need to be active.

They needed to be informed in order to protect liberty.

You're right.

I've taken this far afield.

You'll have to come back in a separate day to get to the.

I apologize, doctor McBride.

We'll get back to the matter.

Anything you want to add there, Spencer?

Oh, I I I will let that be, but but I'm all I'm always an advocate for learning and civic education in history.

When we understand how the world that we occupy came to be the way that it is, we are empowered to make it better.

And I tell my students this if you just accept the world as you found it, that mindset breeds apathy.

If you understand how it came to be the way that it is, you can make it better.

Michael.

Different.

Michael writes to the program and says, it's been a long time since I've read about the burned over district.

Did it also have an effect on the later women's rights movement?

Spencer.

It absolutely did.

Many of the leaders of the women's suffrage movement, for instance, were very much involved in the revivalism.

And in fact, the revivalism really gave them some of their earliest opportunities to speak publicly and to organize publicly and to organize in their communities.

And so it is no accident that the high concentration of revivalism in western New York and the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 happened in the same region of the country.

Michael, thank you for that.

And lastly, I just want to ask for a little bit of historical context.

Doctor McBride.

I said at the outset that it is not unique to the 2024 campaigns or 2025, that you would have people in power claiming a mantle of godliness, claiming that their opponents are heathens or don't understand religious values or traditions, etc.

that that has a long tradition and not every instance of that is the same.

But is it valuable to us to understand that context, that this goes back a long ways and has been weaponized as such?

Absolutely.

It is as old as presidential politics themselves, the very first contested presidential election in our country's history was 1796, and near the end of that campaign, some of John Adams supporters realized that if they focused on Thomas Jefferson's deism, that it that he wasn't a Christian, that he was a deist, that that could be really effective.

And and then the rematch in 1800, it's an all out push to paint Thomas Jefferson and his party as godless and the Federalist as the party of godliness and righteousness, and that kind of attempt to depict your rivals or your opponents as being a religious or, a moral, in a religious sense is as old as presidential politics themselves.

It starts from our very first presidential election.

A contested presidential election feels like we're never gonna get out of that hamster wheel there.

Michael Burke, what do you think?

We're not.

And I wish, in our in our public discourse, there was some realization that there are people of faith and conviction on all sides of the political spectrum and that, You know, that that the people's religious views in, in affect how they engage with politics.

It's not the right is not religion.

It's not it's not all religion.

There's a a realm of choices out there.

There's a range of people of different convictions.

Faith can lead you to all kinds of different political perspectives, and it's so much more complicated than a lot of the the discussion and dialog I see in our public life.

Well, I want to thank doctor McBride for not only making time, but helping us understand that history a bit better.

and, as I mentioned, the event tonight is at 7 p.m..

He's a guest of the Rochester Historical Society.

It is a virtual event you can attend from your own home.

And, lot to to digest there.

Doctor McBride enjoyed that.

Thank you for making time for this program today.

Oh, it was my pleasure.

Spencer is a historian, author, podcaster, associate managing historian of the Joseph Smith Papers Project.

Read a little bit more about Justice's presidential run.

That's a whole other conversation.

Just fascinating stuff.

And Doctor Michael Oberg, distinguished professor of history at Suny Geneseo, thank you for being here, as always.

You're welcome from all of us at connections, it is Mary and Megan and Evan and Rob and a whole team downstairs.

And if I start naming people, I'm in trouble.

I need to get the whole list because there are so many great people who aren't me putting this program out there.

Thank you to everybody.

Thank you for listening and watching.

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