University of Alabama teams with Smithsonian to study role of religion at Capitol on Jan. 6

By Greg Garrison

The University of Alabama has teamed with the Smithsonian Museum to create a website for the study of the role of religion in the events at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (uncivilreligion.org)

The University of Alabama has teamed with the Smithsonian Museum to create a website for the study of the role of religion in the events at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The university’s religious studies department collaborated with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History to set up a web site that went live today, according to the UA News Center.

It will be a continuing digital resource, said Michael Altman, associate professor of religious studies at the University of Alabama.

Titled “Uncivil Religion: January 6, 2021,” the website features digital media including tweets, videos, photos and FBI files associated with religions represented at the U.S. Capitol that day.

The website also features interpretive essays on those religious symbols written by more than a dozen religious studies scholars recruited for the project by Altman and Jerome Copulsky, a research fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, in consultation with Peter Manseau, director of the museum’s Center for the Understanding of Religion in American History.

“This shows that the phenomenon was broader from a religious point of view than many people realized,” Copulsky said.

Altman said researchers reviewed thousands of social media posts from Parler, Twitter and other sites to document the significant religious presence at the event. There are people blowing shofars, a person dressed as Moroni from the Book of Mormon, someone singing “Amazing Grace” and the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” among the evidence presented.

“Our take is that religion was there in very obvious ways,” Altman said. “White Christian nationalism and the QAnon shaman appropriating Native American religions were some of the obvious, but there were more subtle displays as well such as a statue of baby Jesus, but not just any baby Jesus, it was the Infant of Prague and there’s a reason why it was shoved against the Capitol building.”

The religious influences were more varied than some might assume, he said.

“To know in what ways religion showed up, you’d need to know more about what happened that day and more about the various religions represented, not just conservative Christianity,” Altman said. :For instance, there were connections there that were specifically Catholic and that played with New Age spirituality. This resource will help explain all of that.”

Altman said the project started when Manseau reached out to the religious studies department in March.

“The University of Alabama’s religious studies department has an excellent reputation for working on digital projects,” Manseau said. “That made it the perfect collaborator for the research we had been doing on religious symbols present at the Capitol on Jan. 6.”

Altman said he teaches a religious studies and public humanities course for first-year master’s students. Manseau’s proposal provided the class with an excellent opportunity to get hands-on experience with the subject they were learning about, he said.

“Three of our graduate students took the project on and built the website,” Altman said. “They did a fantastic job.”

Altman said he hopes that the “Uncivil Religion” web site will one day become a research hub for religious studies scholars.