Amy McDowell in conversation with Jodi Skipper for Whispers in the Pews Wednesday, March 18 at 5.30pm @ Off Square Books
Ole Miss associate professor Amy McDowell in conversation with Dr. Jodi Skipper for Whispers in the Pews, an exploration of the power of small talk in evangelical church communities, and a bottom-up explanation of Christian nationalism.
About the book
Small talk, whether enjoyed or despised, is often thought of as trivial and largely useless. In churches across the South, however, it can be surprisingly powerful. Whispers in the Pews offers a bottom-up explanation of Christian nationalism, exposing how small talk is utilized to construct an appearance of social and political sameness in evangelical church communities.
McDowell interviewed church attendees in a politically divided Mississippi college town. Students, working class residents, and racial minorities alike described the profound influence of this kind of normalizing small talk in their congregation.
By confining themselves to blander conversation topics, the church, which prides itself on inclusivity, positions itself as welcoming to all. But by creating an environment in which certain topics — border control, electoral politics, race and gender — are discouraged from discussion, a false façade is developed in which everyone is assumed to believe the same things, and any sort of debate is silenced.
About the author
Amy McDowell is an Associate Professor of Sociology and the Director of Queer Mississippi Histories Project at the University of Mississippi. Her ethnographic research on how religion and secularism collide in American culture has been published in leading sociology journals on race, religion, and gender and reprinted in best-selling anthologies for undergraduate students.
About the conversation partner
Jodi Skipper is a race and tourism scholar at the University of Mississippi. In her role as Professor of Anthropology and Southern Studies, she has collaborated with Behind the Big House, a slave dwelling interpretation program in North Mississippi. Based on that work, she has received a Mississippi Humanities Council Humanities Scholar Award, a Whiting Public Engagement Fellowship, the University of Mississippi’s Diversity Innovator Award, the Sanford and Susan Thomas Senior Professor Research Award in the Social Sciences, and Campus Compact’s Thomas Ehrlich Civically Engaged Faculty Award. She co-edited (with Michele Coffey) the book Navigating Souths: Transdisciplinary Explorations of a US Region in 2017 and, in 2022, published an autoethnography, Behind the Big House: Reconciling, Slavery, Race and Heritage in the U.S. South. It tells the story of a southern academic navigating life and a career in landscapes that honor the Confederacy while silencing slavery.
Whispers in the Pews
by Amy McDowell
$30.00
Publisher: New York University Press ISBN:9781479827633
About the Author
