Welcome to the Maxwell Institute podcast. I'm Joseph Stewart.

In the decades before the Civil War, Americans appealed to the nation's sacred religious and legal texts, the Bible and the Constitution, to address the slavery crisis.

The ensuing political debates over slavery deepened interpreters' emphasis on historical readings of these sacred texts, and in turn,

these readings began to highlight the unbridgeable historical distances that separated

19th century Americans from biblical and founding past.

While many Americans continued to adhere to a belief in the Bible's timeless teachings

and the Constitution's enduring principles, some anti-slavery readers, including

Theodore Parker, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln used historical distance to reinterpret

and use the sacred texts as anti-slavery documents.

By using the debate over American slavery as a case study, Jordan Watkins, assistant professor

of church history and doctrine at BYU, traces the development of

American historical consciousness in Antebellum America, showing how a growing emphasis on historical

readings of the Bible and the Constitution gave rise to a sense of historical distance.

Before we begin our interview, could you please be sure to rate, review, and recommend our podcast to others so

that others can find it? Thanks so much. Please enjoy this interview with Dr. Jordan Watkins.

Welcome, Jordan Watkins, the Maxwell Institute podcast. Thank you. Super excited to be here.

We are thrilled to have you here. And we're here to discuss your book from Cambridge University Press,

Slavery and Sacred Texts, the Bible, the Constitution, and Historical Consciousness in Antebellum

America. How did you come to study this? I understand that this book came from your doctoral dissertation.

It did. I studied at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. And pretty early on in my PhD program, I was, of course, looking for a dissertation project. In a class I took, I wrote a paper on Ralph Waldo Emerson's approach to history. And as I wrote that paper, I began to examine some of the scholarship on historical consciousness in Antebellum America.

And I thought that maybe there was more to say there.

So I determined, you know, maybe this is what my project will be.

...