In the contemporary United States, power is exerted at both the center of society and its margins. Americans seeking political and cultural capital can cast themselves as insiders, claiming the authority of tradition, or as outsiders, claiming the prophetic voice of the oppressed. Previous scholarship has tended to portray white American evangelicals either as insiders, a theocracy-in-waiting, or as outsiders, a marginalized subculture. In practice, however, white evangelicals claim both positions and move strategically between them. Under certain circumstances, they appeal to the Christian Right’s revisionist history to claim a position at the center of the nation. Under other circumstances, they invoke threats to “Christian America” to claim a position on the margins. This ethnographic study of Christian heritage tourism in Washington, D.C., examines how white evangelical tourists use American history to construct four identities vis-à-vis the nation. Like white American evangelicals more broadly, they see themselves as founders, exiles, victims, and saviors. In addition to ethnography, I draw on intellectual history and material culture studies to account for the dynamic, contradictory, and strategic ways my subjects understand who they are. Written, verbal, and material stories about the American past are key resources white evangelicals use in shaping their identities. On Christian heritage tours and beyond, white evangelicals do history as they plot themselves into narratives about their communities and their nation. This approach, which combines “lived religion” and “lived history,” shows that white evangelicals are political shapeshifters, playing whichever part gives them the most power in a given situation. Their ability to act as both insiders and outsiders is a source of power in a nation that reveres tradition yet cheers for underdogs. While they may talk about leaving behind their outsider roles of exiles and victims, in practice white American evangelicals embrace and defend those roles just as much as they do their insider roles as founders and saviors. Their creative and strategic movement between these roles is a potent political resource that we must understand if we are to make sense of white evangelicals’ political power today. / 2020-11-13T00:00:00Z

L'histoire est la connaissance de la vie des hommes du passé. Mais l'approche nécessairement rétrospective de l'historien est en contradiction avec la vie qui est, par définition, tournée vers l'avenir. Le savoir historique a donc comme condition de possibilité l'acte de pensée par lequel on imagine, ou l'on fait comme si on vivait à l'époque que l'on cherche à connaître. Or c'est dans le jeu que l'on fait « comme si » l'on vivait telle ou telle chose. Plus spécifiquement, le jeu vidéo fait entrer le joueur, par la représentation, dans un univers concret dont la consistance réside dans la résistance et les appuis qu'il offre à l'action du joueur. Le jeu vidéo est en cela susceptible de permettre au joueur de vivre, en actes, le passé au présent. Toutefois, comme cette forme spécifique de représentation n'a jamais été élaborée ni utilisée dans une perspective proprement savante, il ne va pas de soi pour l'historien d'en faire le médium de l'élaboration et de la transmission de son savoir. L'examen épistémologique de ses ressources propres nous conduit non seulement à remettre en cause la position de Ricoeur selon laquelle la forme exclusive de la connaissance historique est le récit, mais aussi à concevoir une nouvelle forme de jeu vidéo qui permette de faire véritablement l'expérience des formes de vie d'une société révolue. Le joueur doit pouvoir mener, dans cet espace social, un parcours individuel fait de ses interactions avec des personnages non joueurs dont le processus d'individuation procède, lui aussi, du jeu, c'est-à-dire de l'entrelacs, des initiatives des uns et des autres au sein de relations sociales dont les formes et le cadre sont historiquement définis. / History is the knowledge of men's life in the past. But the historian necessarily has a retrospective approach, in contradiction to life which is, by definition, forward-looking. In aiming to resolve this tension, historical knowledge involves the act of thought by which we act as if we were living in the era we seek to know. Acting "as if" we were living such and such an experience is playing. More specifically, the video game brings the player through representation in a particular universe whose consistency lies in the resistance and, on the other hand, the support it offers to the player's enterprises. The video game form is likely to allow the player to experience past times in the present. However, this specific form of representation has never been developed or used in a proper scholarly perspective, and it is far from being naturel for the historian to use it as the medium of development and transmission of knowledge. The epistemological review of its own resources leads us not only to question Ricoeur's position that narrative is the exclusive form of historical knowledge, but also to design a new kind of video game that allows us to experience ways of life of bygone societies ; the player's personal journey in this social space proceeds from interactions with non-player characters whose individuation process also results from the intertwining between enterprises of all characters in social relations which have historically defined forms.