(Mis)Remembering America: Religion and Forgetting in the United States

In the early 2000s, Boston College, a Jesuit Catholic university, paid $168 million to the Boston Archdiocese in land purchases. During the same period, the archdiocese paid over $95 million in settlements to 627 victims of Clergy-Perpetrated Sexual Abuse. On the purchased property, the McMullen Art Museum now occupies the estate last inhabited by the infamous Cardinal Law, and the Boston College Clough School of Theology and Ministry is housed in a building to its rear. Grounded in the work of Avery Gordon and using the method of autoethnography, I trace my own theological work in these spaces as an experience of paradoxical haunting – at once called to memory by knowledge of the victims, and tempted into forgetting by the good work now done within these walls. Such re-use of space is an explicit strategy of encouraged forgetting that negates processes for justice and facilitates the intergenerational impacts of abuse.

This paper examines the ways in which the myth of the family farm is constructed and maintained in rural America through memory, religion, and political discourse. Framed around a December 2024 letter from the Republican Governors Association, the paper explores how rural farmers are depicted as defenders of a virtuous agrarian lifestyle in opposition to a dangerous secular world. The family farm narrative functions as an intentional and institutionalized form of forgetting that obscures the realities of corporate-driven agriculture while reinforcing specific social, religious, and gendered ideals. Through this lens, the paper addresses the political and cultural stakes of mythmaking and forgetting in America’s heartland and questions how evangelical ideologies about nature, domination, and family structures shape the midwestern farm.

In October 1920, American Unitarians and their allies gathered in Plymouth, Massachusetts to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the Pilgrim Fathers’ famous Mayflower voyage. While ostensibly following a familiar Christian nationalist narrative of the Pilgrims as the founders of a Christian America, the Unitarians ended up revising the history. The Pilgrims, they claimed, had been champions of “liberal” religious principles such as freedom, tolerance, and harmony, and therefore, their history should be celebrated as a “common past” for religious liberals across nations and traditions in the modern world. To visualize this, the Unitarians invited guests from many European countries and two Asian countries (Japan and India) who represented various Christian sects and even non-Christian faiths like Buddhism and Hinduism. Attempted at this international, interfaith commemoration was a radical transformation of the Pilgrims from a tiny community of seventeenth-century Calvinists to a global icon of modern liberal ecumenism.

In this paper, I develop a conception of queer forgetting, utilizing the 1973 Up Stairs Lounge gay bar fire, its 2003 memorialization, and planned 2025 rededication as case studies. The memory of marginalized groups is frequently fragile, subject to oppressive social and legislative forces, and often necessarily leaves little trace; this is particularly true of queer memory. I argue that in retrieving and reviving lost queer memories, historians must consider queer subjects’ opacity, lest archival violence perpetuate the suppression of contemporary queer voices. Bringing archival theory to bear on memory studies and drawing upon scholars like Charles Long, Edouard Glissant, I assert that those reclaiming the past must responsibly assess if there are names one should not recall, stories one should not tell. Perhaps some names, some stories, should be forgotten.