The Feeling of Forgetting

With unabashed frankness and unrelenting truth-telling, Corrigan offers much-needed clarity to the ongoing attempts to account for enduring racism and religious hatred that too often portray the coexistence of Christianity and racism as an unfortunate contradiction or oversimplify the relationship between ideology and violence. A game-changing study. -- Sylvester Johnson, Virginia Tech Corrigan draws on a lifetime of research and writing about religion, race, and violence to offer insights where others have shrugged with befuddlement. White racial anxiety, he argues, is a feeling produced by the unsuccessful labor of forgetting the violence inherent to chattel slavery and Native dispossession. The result is a charged meditation on religious whiteness in the United States. -- Jennifer Graber, University of Texas at Austin Corrigan offers a nuanced look at America's sorry history of racism, violence, and trauma from the colonial era to January 6 and beyond, taking on American Christianity's proclivity for forgetting our society's traumatic past. This is a wise and important book with the potential to reshape our national discourse. -- Randall Balmer, Dartmouth College Through a sweeping critical review of interdisciplinary work on emotions, trauma, memory, and history, Corrigan carefully assembles a way to understand the intergenerational transmission of trauma among both victims and perpetrators of collective violence. A remarkable and courageous book. -- William M. Reddy, Duke University