Unveiling the Tapestry of Early American Print Culture: A Critique of Techno-Optimism with Dr. Michael Baysa

Embark on a historical odyssey with us as we host Michael Baysa, postdoctoral history scholar from Washington University in St. Louis, who meticulously peels back the layers of early American print culture. His compelling narratives bring to light the selective democratization of print and the hidden struggles of figures like Santiago de Puglia in disseminating progressive ideas. Together, we uncover the complex interplay of language, identity, and power that defined the nation's earliest days and echoes into our modern era.

Revelations abound in this episode, as we traverse the influence of religious establishments and linguistic diversity in shaping America's formative years. Michael Beza offers a critical perspective on the advantages Protestant groups held in leveraging printing for their benefit, alongside the restrictive societal undercurrents that curtailed voices like Puglia's. We dissect the role of anti-Catholic sentiment and explore how key figures of American history interacted with and were influenced by multilingual and multicultural dynamics.

We wrap up with a look towards the future, featuring up-and-coming academic Michael Baysa whose insights into the religious history of America's printing press promise to spark fresh academic discourse. Follow his journey at @MichaelBaysa, and stay connected with the evolving conversation on the relationship between religion, culture, and politics. As we close this chapter, we leave you enriched with a deeper appreciation of the nuanced forces that continue to sculpt the narrative of American society.

Transcript

C. Derick Varn: 1:35

Hello and welcome to Varnblog. And today I am here with Michael Baysa, a postdoc in history at Washington University in St Louis, and today we are discussing a paper that I heard at the US Society for Intellectual History on, let's just say, Spanish language publications and the founding of the US Republic. But it's really interesting to me about how this particular story illustrates it's a counter narrative to the dominant narrative about print history in the United States and the free market of ideas etc and so forth. So this takes us back to 1793, which is a little different than what we normally cover on the show, but we're going to get there and we'll tie it into today as best we can. So tell me the story of Santiago and Puglia James de Puglia. Let's get into this little bit.

Michael Baysa: 2:58

Yeah, so the paper that I presented was literally a I think you put it really well the counter narrative to the sense that the public sphere was this open space for debate and that the only thing that's really determining how ideas went out was the market and how well you can play to a particular audience of Americans at the time. So Santiago de Puglia was the guy who I presented on, but my entire sort of work is looking at all these figures who were just disappointed by the printing press, like that's the story. I love writing about folks who were really great counter examples to this idea that, again, the printing press was accessible, it was facilitating democratization when, reality, only certain kinds of voices were really being printed at the time, and, insofar as you want to say, you know, as our certain founding fathers, non-elites who could get into the printing press, sure, if you want to make that argument, but there are a lot of other non-elites who also couldn't get in. So Santiago de Puglia was one of the figures that I was looking at, and he's really this guy who is a big fan of Tom Thomas Paine, and he wanted to be the Spanish voice for Thomas Paine, and what he realized, though, was that even if he tried to use every trick in the book to get published, almost everyone, most publishers, just did not want to take him seriously, even though he had the backing of certain founding fathers.

Michael Baysa: 4:32

And so over the course of his really trying to get himself out there, trying to spread the ideals of the American Revolution to folks in the greater Spanish Americas, he realized that there were so many barriers to entry for someone like him that he had all these other publications planned and he decided that after he published his first piece it got almost like very low reception. He sort of just kind of gave up. He said that he, and whenever I read his writings, the sense of disappointment I was just like this guy really felt what maybe some of us feel today about the sense that I don't know, maybe American democracy just was not as open or as accessible as it's initially pitched. So those are the stories that really caught my eye, and so the publishing angle of this was that the narrative I always hear from book historians is that, oh, anyone, everyone who wants to be out there voice themselves.

Michael Baysa: 5:36

This is the true essence of democracy, and the printing press was the site for that, and that just wasn't the case, whether you're especially if you're not a Spanish speaker at the time compared to European presses which are printing in various languages, like regularly, like if you were to do a comparison, you know, american printing press was not only so behind but so much more constrained and limited, and I don't think I can carry the weight of the public sphere, I think, the way we talk about it today and so so that's really the project at hand, so I'm glad you're engaging with with a piece in such a productive and fruitful way.

C. Derick Varn: 6:11

Well, there's a couple of things that came up to me. I mean, I would say, somewhat conservative sociologists. Fickna and Rodney Stark Rodney Serks, probably the more famous of the two talk about the role of the free market and the churching of America. And then Hatch and Mark Knoll, who both talk about this as well. Now, I like some of Mark Knoll's other work. I'm a big fan of reappropriating his. The scandal of the event of the political mind for everything that I want to insult.

C. Derick Varn: 6:54

But it is interesting to me that they present the printing space of the United States as relatively on a monitored, that people were on equal grounds, that it didn't have as much church or state involvement, so it was freer. But one of the things you make pretty clear is just that's not true. No, there weren't state censors in the same way. But it is not true that there was an egalitarian marketplace here and that everything was on equal grounds. And I think it's interesting to talk about DeBuglia a little bit, because he was not, I mean, to me like he's a non-elite, but only kind of. I mean the man like was an interpreter for Thomas Jefferson. That's not a small thing, Totally totally.

C. Derick Varn: 7:57

So, and one of the things you point out is he kind of seems to have gotten caught up in in a kind of anti-Catholic sentiment, even though he himself was not a Catholic, nor was he particularly interested In fact what he was trying to do a little bit anti-Catholic himself. So would you like to talk about that a little bit?

Michael Baysa: 8:21

Yeah, sure. So for those who haven't read Finky and Stark and Nolan Hatch, they're sort of they've written in, they've written in their like 1990s or so, and a lot of the field is still grappling with the sort of the things that they propose, which is sort of during the American Revolution, religion, sort of the story of secularization. The founding of America was very secular and that opened up America for all these new Protestant denominations Baptists, methodists. They sort of took over from previous denominations, which are the Congregation lists and Quakers, and for them it was the rise of these new Protestant groups that really evidence, or seem for them to evidence, a kind of free market space. But the thing that I've sort of always been struck by, that argument was okay, but what about all these other groups that didn't succeed? What do we make of them if they were struggling?

Michael Baysa: 9:27

And of course this is a detraction for that kind of narrative and I think a lot of Protestant narrations of the early founding still turns a hatch and turns to null under histories. So I'm actually arguing that look at the ascension of Protestantism. Right, it is out of secularization, it is out of a free market that Protestantism can flourish. That's sort of the attract the narrative there, why a lot of folks really latch onto that. But again, like if we were to take the frame outside of, protestants, like Catholics, were having a hard time still, deists were having a hard time really, you know, sort of, even though there are sort of high, high, high ranking official Deists within the sort of the founding fathers sort of circles, like it's not like it was ever. You know, it ever took off and the same way Baptists and Methodists did.

C. Derick Varn: 10:22

And so that is interesting to me. Actually, that point is interesting because most of the founding fathers were Deists, although the only one who was really super public about it was Jefferson. Yet there isn't like a strong public, like after the revolution, there's not a strong publication track record for Deists' treatises and whatnot. It's really kind of interestingly.

Michael Baysa: 10:51

So when you look at people's reception to American reception to Thomas Paine, we'll tell you exactly what Deists were a little more on the back end, but so that, yeah, that was one of the things that struck me, and actually even a lot of these Deists were predicting that it wasn't Deism that was going to sort of be the new religion. They thought that Unitarians were going to be the new sort of religion in the new nation because that was sort of treading the new age, that was trying to the middle line between the new age and sort of the Puritan congregation lists that they were coming from. And of course that prediction didn't work out.

C. Derick Varn: 11:31

Yeah, they didn't see the burnt over district coming.

Michael Baysa: 11:34

They didn't, and I don't think anyone did. But one of the things that I was always curious, one of the sort of the scholarship has moved a lot past from Hatch and Knoll to basically show that Protestants never declined during the founding of America. In fact, the way that the American founding was set up was to advantage certain Protestant groups. So that's where the scholarship really is now, in the sense that a lot of Protestants just knew, like, even though so it was anyone for folks who are familiar with the notion of the disestablishment of America, right, churches didn't disestablishment, that there can't be any state churches but the state can't sponsor any particular religion that this method is knew precisely how to take advantage of that phenomenon. And so, while we think of it as a religiously neutral kind of thing, at the time, certain groups were already positioned really well to take full advantage of that sort of disaffiliate state disaffiliation that ensured that they would succeed, more so than their counterparts. And so some people would say that's a market argument.

Michael Baysa: 12:47

But again, a lot of the more recent scholarships argued that no, it's, it's the reason they serve, they thrive, was because they knew how to use print networks, they had pre-establishing connections with certain publishers or they. They were proximate enough to certain publishing houses where they could try and make those moves and, like you said you mentioned the, the burn over district, I think some a lot of Charles Finney success and a lot of other sort of itinerants at the time. They knew how to use the printing press really well and they didn't have the same barriers into it the same way Catholics did, the same way that all these other figures did, and so that the story isn't so much that it's a free market or free religious market, it's that. No, they had certain advantages over other groups that already allow them to succeed in that in that space. And so that's why I love this time period, because it's like, oh, it's not democracy, it's not the democratization that maybe a few of them, their success, it's all these other things that they already had kind of an advantage of.

C. Derick Varn: 13:52

One thing that your paper reminded me of and I mean for for people who are more knowledgeable about historical American law but is the disestablishment of churches really only applied to the federal government and states that put it in their constitution? But there are plenty of states that didn't do that and until the until the post of a war amendments you couldn't apply the bill of rights to state governments Like so. I mean, in some cases there was literal establishment of churches, but it was also interesting how, even though these groups weren't established, you have both dissenter groups and Anglican groups very well positioned already to take advantage of the loopholes and laws and and how to get affiliation, and they had gotten very good at it before we even had really worked out our legal framework entirely.

Michael Baysa: 14:47

Right, exactly, and and and that's the thing that I'm sort of I've had to think about, right, so if this establishment never actually took place on a sort of was ever enforced as a national, what if? What if this establishment was a national rhetoric but on the ground worked slowly through the states? Why are we so? How much weight do we put on national disestablishment as a story more so than an actual thing that did something at the time? Right, I think there's a kind of investment in this establishment being such like a foundational thing without people saying it is more symbolic really than actually enacting the sort of creating domino effect for change or, for, you know, weakening Protestant cultural power at the time. I don't know if you've encountered that kind of sort of critical lens on on how people talk about this establishment as if it's this great thing when it took a long time, and I don't know that even I question, like to what extent actually did things at the time?

C. Derick Varn: 15:57

Well, it's interesting to me because I think people kind of have their cake and eat it to, about the federal government before the Civil War, where it's like it's a very weak federal government and there's a whole lot of limit, like states rights has more self-sufficiency meaning than the rhetorical meaning that it has after the Civil War. But there's there's so much that I that I hit about this because the debates about language come up a lot. In this One I didn't realize how much Spanish was spoken in the, in the, not just in the continent, because of course New Spain, blah, blah, blah, but in the competition. You know, having studied the history of Georgia a little bit, I knew that like one of the reasons why they tolerated that weird non-slavery, utopian, old with orb colony that would later become a state of Georgia was as a buffer between the English colonies.

C. Derick Varn: 16:57

in the Spanish they're like well put the criminals there.

Michael Baysa: 17:00

Florida is the Florida, the threat right.

C. Derick Varn: 17:03

Yeah, Florida was a different threat back then, but it was the threat. But I did not realize there were approximately 20,000 Catholics and Spanish speaking, a lot of the Spanish speaking Catholics. I did realize there were a ton of Sephardic Jews in the United States, about these thousand In fact, like a large portion of the Jews that are allowed back into Britain after the, you know, the expulsion of Britain is reversed, they're immediately sent to the United States. Like they let them in. This is, you know, this is earlier history than what you're dealing with but they let them in purely despite the Spanish, and then send them immediately to the colonies, I mean the proto United States. Of course we have this all in against the Spanish attitude and like, well, you know, we can deal with some Sephardic Jews if they're bad at the Spanish, they're not going to side with them, so throw them over there.

C. Derick Varn: 18:01

And but that? That? That is interesting because it means you have a large part of colonial America, even in the, even before the establishment of the country, that is Spanish speaking, that Spanish actually has a fairly high regard in the colonies, which I was surprised at. That was something in your, in your paper that I did not know. That like that, despite the contestation with the Catholic, with Catholic Spain, that Spanish itself as a language was not particularly looked down upon. And yet that's sort of kind of what made the deputably surprised when he didn't get that much institutional support. Right, Like yeah, can we talk a little bit about what would be in the United States in the establishment of English as the primary?

Michael Baysa: 18:52

Yeah, sure. So Benjamin Franklin was one who was most invested in English becoming like the central language. But part of that is because he was also anxious about sort of German immigration in Philadelphia and so it was a project for him to say that well, okay, so there needs to be a centralized language for the nation. And, of course, as a printer, as a publisher, that makes perfect sense. You could even speculate that the big reason why he was kind of like anti German was because German. So the Germans in Philadelphia established their own printing presses with their own types. So Franklin was probably sensing some sort of competition there and he did ask some of the German speaking groups like, why don't you all print with me, why don't you? And so there's definitely that anxiety, there's this openness to other languages.

Michael Baysa: 19:44

I think it's part of like my sense is that there's a kind of elitist cosmopolitanism at play here where, in order for America to be recognized as sort of on the world stage like, they need to be able to be conversant in all these languages. And I think I argue at the end of the tail end of the paper that that's one of the primary reasons why publishers decided, okay, maybe we can start printing for these immigrants, with an eye not so much towards the domestic market all the Spanish speakers here but maybe we can get folks in Spain to buy our squares, maybe we can get folks in New Spain to buy our wares. So this attention to the sense that Spanish is here but we don't want to acknowledge that it's here. That is not the character of the domestic market, because Spanish is always out there. That was another dynamic I was sort of trying to catch in this paper. So there's this weird dynamic right where America was very multilingual.

Michael Baysa: 20:45

I think most early Americanists are having to be very, you know, have to be very, have to be trained in numerous languages. Now, like you can't just study English anymore. Most history departments are very wary of someone who's like just working with Anglo Protestants again, because they know that that's the reality, all right. So, yeah, we know that multilingualism in America in early America was the reality, but yet for some reason, publishers and some other invested individuals don't want that to be the story of what America was, or seem to want to have multilingualism be a feature of what America was becoming at the time, and for various reasons, and there's part of it.

Michael Baysa: 21:35

Part of it is like respectability, like who did they really want to be? Who did these American politicians really want to be? Sort of looking at them and that if they were to embrace all of these other languages, like how would that look to, maybe folks in Paris? How would that look to folks in London? I think these dynamics are certainly a play, but, yeah, I mean, one of the large native dialects still made up most of what, the lands of what would become America, but that's not something we often talk about. In fact, the idea of America always expanding is tracking with how English is expanding. I think that that's the sort of and, of course, part of that's like governance, like America is about the political institutions and insofar as the governance that we're tracking, sure, but the people's that make up America, like it's always a multilingual for them.

C. Derick Varn: 22:33

Well, it's interesting to me because, of course, as a person who studies nationalism qua nationalism, I immediately think of, like my debates with Benedict Anders. Well, I don't have personal debates with Benedict Andersen, but when I read, you know, imagine communities, I have my debates in the marginal notes. But it does seem that, like the national project in America is, it has a very strange character in that we wanna establish English internally but we're okay with printing stuff far as long as we're just expanding our market influence back to Europe and like proving that we're worth something. And this dynamic actually, interestingly, goes back pretty far. You talk about I did not know this either that Cotton Mather was like printing anti-Catholic text in Spanish, like all the way back in the late 17th century and late 17th century and like 1699. And that this, actually to bring this into the techno pessimism of this this actually was limited by the fact that, like technologically, this was a bigger ass than you realize initially, just because of the letter plates and whatnot. So you wanna go into that a little bit.

Michael Baysa: 23:48

Yeah, sure, just to quit on on Mather. That was a really bad Spanish text. Like it's like when you're learning Spanish. He's like how can I make my name sound Spanish? I'm gonna add like a vowel to the end of it it's Mather to Mather row, as if that would register as more Spanish. That's like middle school, kind of like fudging right there. But you're right in the sense that this is something that I sort of have a conversation with book historians about, because whenever they talk about the printing press, they do celebrate the kind of ingenuity of the types that allowed Mather to print his Spanish text, which meant sacrificing sort of the tilde for the N, sacrificing N types basically to create the tilde, and by using the word sacrifice here, because literally as soon as you carve on a metal type, that type's unusable and types were expensive to replace. And so that dynamic of who is this for, like how did publishers imagine languages in this time period? Like who's the audience for them? For Mather there was clearly like an attempt to try it.

Michael Baysa: 25:07

So a background on the Mather texts you had these two Sephardic Jewish merchants, the Phrazon brothers, and he observed I think he flagged this earlier after Jews were sort of allowed to resettle back in London a lot of. There was an explosion of Jewish conversion narratives to Protestantism in London, and Mather grew anxious realizing that, oh, they're getting Jewish converts. Where's our Jewish converts? We're falling behind here. And so that's why he, whenever so merchants would pass through Boston all the time to specify Puritans not being very happy with Jews living in the same location as them. And so he saw these merchants and was like, okay, I gotta convert these guys. But this bit, so say, he did his best attempt at both Spanish and Hebrew actually, so Hebrew text types make a huge sort of argument for this too. Where he then craft, he translates one of his more famous Germans among you England's to Spanish and he tells and he's like, this will convert them. I am sure of it. Now what?

C. Derick Varn: 26:18

happened.

Michael Baysa: 26:18

I think it's the best words of Protestants since Martin Luther. Go ahead, it is. I was like he gave them a copy of this text and they were sort of disappointed by it. And then they were like, okay, you know what you guys are, puritans fine, I'll take it, won't take it personally. He basically insulted them, saying that you guys are Jews, are so far behind the Protestants, and insulted them in every way possible. And also he told them that we're not as bad as Catholics. That's why I don't even think about Catholicism. So he didn't have a problem. So they were like okay, fine, we'll let that pass. The problem is they didn't convert. And so Mather then got I don't know.

Michael Baysa: 26:57

There was something in his diary.

Michael Baysa: 26:59

Actually it was Samuel Sewell, who was one of the other ministers, who said Mather started having a pretended vision that he converted the phrase on brothers and he started talking to other people about it and actually that was the nail.

Michael Baysa: 27:13

That sort of broke the relationship with the phrase on brothers all together and Mather would start lying about having had a vision of sort of converting them. And after that I think Sewell was basically saying like after that they didn't want to hear anything about Christianity anymore whatsoever, and that was like a faux pas on Mather's part. But to go back to the language question, if it couldn't do that, if it couldn't convert them, like it seemed like I was always I always wondered this like you have a Spanish text, so you're trying to communicate with someone in another language, but clearly the effect of that text is not so much to convert them or the genre or the way that he did. It wasn't so much to convert them, but and he appended, he wrote this in the intention for it, it's to encourage other Anglo Protestants to also talk on how to talk to other sort of non-angler Protestants, and so and so now, now the-.

C. Derick Varn: 28:13

These particular people. It's just to encourage the activity of conversion generally, maybe.

Michael Baysa: 28:19

Right and to model for them how to talk to them, despite the fact that they didn't work that way. And so these are some of the things I'm tracking here. Which is like why are these Protestant ministers trying to speak in another language when it's not doing the converting work that they're doing? Yet for some reason they know that it's not supposed to convert. It's supposed to somehow do something else for other English speakers, maybe to help them feel like their religious messaging was more universal than it was, or to give them some confidence that their ministers know what they're doing when maybe they don't. There's all these dynamics that I'm tracking that.

Michael Baysa: 28:57

So the broader argument here is that most of the language productions pre-1800 really had an eye towards how do we make sort of Anglo Protestantism look bigger, more universal, also committed to conversionism than it actually was? So the question of audiences always struck me when it comes to these again non-English productions in, and that explains why it's so shoddy, why most of the most non-English productions by the English colonial printing press were so bad, because they didn't care. It was not to communicate with Spanish speakers or French speakers, it was mostly to try and not now to say. Now I say that despite the fact that some of them would say that they actually do care about reaching an international audience. But the function of their works just did not do that. Rather it did more. So the let me buttress my own religious authority among my congregation who's wondering what kind of international work we're doing, or something along those lines.

C. Derick Varn: 30:03

I mean interestingly, it almost seems like it did the opposite, like it actually hindered their ability to convert people because it was so bad and sloppy.

Michael Baysa: 30:11

Yeah, although the well Puritans were, they were investing conversion. But there is a strand of scholarship that's argued that they never actually cared. But they only cared insofar as London was looking at them and saying what are you guys doing? Are you actually converting other folks? So when Anglican's the SPG, the Society for Propagation of the Gospel and Anglican's in London came up with their own missionary organization a lot of this was in the 1720s a lot of missionary organizations, a lot of the missionaries in New England were basically like oh, we gotta step our game up, like we can't lose out to these guys. The problem is like no one else cared. But the only reason they cared was because there are potentially other missionaries now coming into the new world and they're like oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We can't lose to the Anglicans, we can't lose to the Quakers. It was never a sustained project. I think that clues me in on the fact that I don't know, did they really care about conversion or did it?

C. Derick Varn: 31:09

yeah, theologic, I mean just putting on my Puritan hat. Theologically, it's like something they're supposed to care about. But also, since they're Calvinists, do they, though? I mean like and this paradox to me is actually something I've thought about in the European context like Calvinists tend to not be that bad the Jews, because they assume they're damned anyway and thus leave them alone. So it's one of those ironies of like, well, the Jewish I mean you will read this in modern polemics from Calvinist we've never like massacred Jews, and I'm like, yeah, because you thought they were going to hell.

C. Derick Varn: 31:51

And so what was the point? Like, ironically, like the effect of your theology being condemnatory is that, like, you didn't really try to convert Jews all that much, and not that, you know, not that vociferously, whereas the Lutherans are what you know, what have you, since they didn't have double predestination or whatever, did actually try, and they aren't really mad about it. But it's interesting thinking about cotton mather being like, we have to convert because, like, look at those Anglicans, we can't lose to the Anglicans. Let's like put together a Spanish text that's insulting to these Sephardic Jews. I mean, I was going to ask you because, like that Spanish is Ladino and for those of you who don't know. Like it's closer to Spanish than, say, yiddish, is to say standard German, but like it's not quite standard Spanish either. It's got elements of Greek and little bits of Hebrew in it Did they know any of that Like so there.

Michael Baysa: 32:59

So some scholars have speculated that actually the merchants themselves may have also been helping cotton mather put that text together. There's a new book that came out by Christine DeGroos, mather Spanish Lessons, which tracks all the potential Spanish influences on Mather. I thought that was a super helpful book for tracking the history of Spanish. So I think some of the enslaved peoples in Mather's household were also potentially also fluent in Spanish. It could have helped him in that regard. They had a lot of Spanish adjacent texts, like Latin texts textbooks, in their libraries. So there is a world where you know Spanish was everywhere, but also at the same time when they choose to deploy Spanish. That's when it gets questionable.

C. Derick Varn: 33:55

I was gonna ask you. I mean, you bring up enslavement. This is tangential. But the image that most people have when we bring up enslavement is transatlantic African shadow slavery. But a lot of the slaves in Puritan, new England, were actually indigenous people, often enslaved by the Spanish and sold to. Is that the case in the Madder scenario, or are we talking about like African slaves, and so why do they speak Spanish?

Michael Baysa: 34:25

Yeah, no, that's the case it's. There is a kind of intermixing in the transatlantic slave trade is very sort of like it does create a kind of deasporic effect of folks from all over the world do end up finding themselves in sort of enslaved New England. Yeah, that's certainly the case.

C. Derick Varn: 34:45

Okay, I mean because I remember, like for separate for separate, looking up the witch trial, and there's always this you know things about Titchiba being somehow like the assumption in a lot of modern portrayals is that she's African and actually the texts seem to indicate that she's actually some kind of indigenous person who's not local, not locally indigenous. And when I realized that I'm like my picture of pre-colonial slavery is actually probably wrong and that it was much more multi, not in the oh, look at the poor Irish indigenous servants sense, but that there were lots of enslaved indigenous from like the William and Mary war and stuff not the way of the war. What's that war called that really bloody war in the Puritan period. I can't remember.

Michael Baysa: 35:45

Well, there's Queen Anne's war, and then there's Medi-Com's war or King Philip's war.

C. Derick Varn: 35:50

King Philip's war is King Philip's war and then Queen Anne's war I think I've got William and Mary confusing that. But yeah, there's all these. I mean, basically there's a bunch of early, early settler indigenous wars that are very bloody. I think often, like, how brutal those wars were has been largely bracketed out of even not modern scholarship, but like that modern scholarship hasn't reached schools, for example, like even maybe even undergrads are not quite aware of how brutal that those wars were.

C. Derick Varn: 36:26

But this kind of this is an interesting thing to think about because basically it implies that the performative printing of like a elite cosmopolitanism actually has a fairly long pedigree by the time we get to the early, the early republic, but that it's really not interested in like people who speak those languages internally at all. Like and that's a fascinating thing to think about Like okay, so we're printing stuff in French and German and Spanish, not because we have French and German and Spanish speakers here, which we do, but we're not gonna talk about that, that's a problem. No, we're printing it so that we look like we're trying to sell stuff to the Europeans.

Michael Baysa: 37:15

Yeah, so that's the part about I think I forgot to attend to what you flagged as like the techno optimism, right that there has been sort of a long history of folks who just believe that the printing press does things, that it's not this public sphere. I think, as we look back on using Habermas's framework or using all the other late 20th century optimisms about this period, like mapping that back, but and that's the thing that I'm trying to figure on the research, like, what was the printing press for then, if it's not to disseminate information, if it's not to create conversations, multilingual conversations, if it's not to help convert, but like, what is it for? What is it doing? That, for me, has been sort of the key question of my research, which is, I think you use the term performative, right. So what is the thing that? What is the performance in print mean compared to other kinds of rhetorical modes? Is it just an attempt to try and prefer your authority or to make it sound like it's more important, more state sanctioned, more representative of a broader public, when it's not Like?

Michael Baysa: 38:25

These are the dynamics that I'm really trying to track in my work, because I do think that it is quite performative, like the printing discourse versus actual dialogue, like whenever I look at and that's the thing that I sort of my historiographical intervention is all right, if something is printed, let's stop treating it and it has this effect, right? Is that the primary mode of publicity, then? Or are manuscripts also public forms of documents and people read them side by side? But printed texts registered differently, not because it's more public per se, but because it has a different kind of effect? That's sort of the.

Michael Baysa: 39:05

If I were to have a historian hot take like my hot, I've leaned with historians to say manuscripts are public documents. Print is an institutionally backed kind of document. It could be public, it could be private, regardless. The power of print lies in who seems to be sanctioned in this kind of speech and what kind of performative work is it doing. If we were to treat it that way, that kind of like brings a lot of questions about like oh shoot, what kind? What would make a printed discourse at this time? Right?

C. Derick Varn: 39:39

It does, kind of one. I would assume, for example, that manuscripts would be kind of like a, a Melbourne. You know Consprecia's consumption good, but it doesn't seem that that's there at all. In fact, in some cases it actually seems like print kind of served that function, not in all cases, not in a consistent way, but in a way that like, oh well, it has this imperator of, like printers are putting it out there. So it comes with a certain amount of legitimacy and we're publishing some stuff just for the legitimacy of saying we publish certain stuff, not even because we care about what it is. And the Cotton Mather is an interesting way to think about that. And one of the things that, to bring it back to de Puglia, is I mean he has this, you know text, el desingueño, which I'm asking.

C. Derick Varn: 40:36

El desingueño, the lone thing I think yeah, yeah, that just doesn't do very well and it's hard to figure out why it doesn't do very well. But it seems like part of the problem is he doesn't get that. This is not really about discourse Like that. He that like he weirdly sort of believes late 20th century mistakes like but at the time and this leads to kind of a financial disaster for it. So you want to talk about that specific issue.

Michael Baysa: 41:15

Yeah, I flagged it in the beginning in the sense of disappointment, and that's because that's how everyone talked about the printing press, right. So techno optimists, I love to flag them as like they're the tech bros of the 18th century, in the sense that almost everyone who writes about printing has to look at Benjamin Franklin and they take him at his word about the kinds of things printing can do. And I'm like that's a very uncritical reading of someone who's invested in the publishing industry to be as successful as it was and he has his hands in the publishing industry throughout the entire Atlantic. Some of the folks that he apprenticed ended up printing, I think, in Kingston, jamaica, I think his route, and Franklin, I think his sister-in-law, was a printer in Rhode Island and so of course he's invested in wanting to make printing a viable mode of publicity in this time. But we never critique him on that, like we never say like whoa, is that really the case? And that's why folks like Puglia have been very sort of helpful.

Michael Baysa: 42:24

One of the other things that I've one of the other folks I've been hung at are other sort of religious minorities in this time period. So the Ephraeric Hloester, which is a German pietist sort of group offshoot in Philadelphia. I've also been looking at the Universal Society of Friends by Jomama Wilkinson, who's who some folks would say is the first like transgender sort of public figure in America. All of them were skeptical about the printing press, like they knew there was some cultural hegemony in the printing press and the folks who were promoting it are invested in whatever the cultural hegemony was, and that that was their suspicion, allied with what the medium itself communicates to those who engage with it and those who sort of have to track what it does to society beyond, just again, the democratization optimism that I think most folks still read the printing press is doing.

Michael Baysa: 43:21

But one of the things I've had to also be attend the thing. Another question that sort of caught my eye is like why are people so committed to the printing press doing this work, like what? I'm curious if you thought about this, like why do you think people want to say that the printing press has got a culturally bound technology and that somehow technology is the thing that will liberate us, that will help move us forward in history and help us progress to a much better society? I think for me that's been an interesting question. I don't know if you've thought along those lines.

C. Derick Varn: 43:55

I think about this all the time, because one of the things I think is, like everybody thinks we've abandoned Wiggish history until they like look at what we're saying right now.

C. Derick Varn: 44:03

And what you're saying is like like, yeah, you can get all this discourse that says there is no progress, but we still actually kind of assume it when we talk about stuff like the printing press. The other thing is my deeper suspicion and this is not one I could this is like one of those suspicions that I could never really publish in an academic journal because they would be like you can't prove this and I'd be like well, you're right, I can't prove it. But my suspicion is it actually has something to do with trying to see the establishment of the nation through something like a print culture, as more open than it actually was, so that you can somehow have this redemption narrative of like, well, there are some nationalisms that are not exclusively see, because we have this printing culture that was really vibrant and it wasn't, except that in reality it was and also it did weird stuff that you wouldn't even expect it to do. There is I have, I think recently I've seen some pushback on this optimism about the printing press, one of the things that people have really started looking at, but not in terms of America. It seems to come out in terms of Europe, where people are like okay, well, we don't really have witch trials until you get the printing press tied in with like people trying to contradict the church, so like you get weird stuff like undiminology by James Stewart, king of England, which is bizarre but is, you know, massively distributed. So in some ways, you know, you have this kind of counter narrative.

C. Derick Varn: 45:46

But I suspect even that counter narrative is a little bit about people freaking out about social media. Honestly, because I might get suspicious that we're talking about this now when we're talking about social contagion on social media, since this has been obvious for like 400 years. But it does seem like people don't want to abandon this idea that print culture is inherently brolibratory. And I think about this today because I work in printing. I don't have so much anymore, but I think a lot about this idea that people ignore power, law and the weight of an individual publishing scheme and even some direct stuff like I don't want to sound conspiratorial, but we all know now that the OSS and CIA really did have their hand on artistic publishing for some reason in the middle of the 20th century, and that's real, it's been documented and so you're like well, why? And it's like, well, there's something about the official culture and there's also something about people believing that it's organic. It seems really important, not just to the state but to like elite institutions that may be peristate or even formally removed from the state but don't want to admit that they're, like, involved in this project in some way.

C. Derick Varn: 47:19

I was also thinking about like and again unscientific, unscholarly responsible on my part speculation. But one of the things that was interesting about like, say, the Rodney Stark, finca discourse of the 1990s, it was kind of like taking two prior strands one, the reactionary strand, I mean super Catholic reactionary strand of like the reason why we have secularization is you stupid Protestants in the first place. And then, like you know, almost like I mean it's almost like cancel of Trent, level reactionary, but is a strand of Catholic thought that has 200 years of pedigree, honestly. And then there's this other strand of like, well, secularization is good and it's going to get rid of religion, like this kind of early 19th century, almost Marxist kind of interpretation. And Stark and Finca seem to be taking that and going well, you know what. You're both wrong, because you're both right.

C. Derick Varn: 48:21

Yes, the Protestants, the Protestants in, call secularization that would result of it.

C. Derick Varn: 48:27

And also, secularization doesn't lead to no religion, it leads to a bunch of religions and while as an intervention against those two kind of master narratives, I kind of get it, particularly as a kind of an inter liberal conservative debate, honestly, where it's like you know, I shouldn't accuse Stark of being a conservative, but he's always read to me like he's kind of sympathetic to at least libertarians and Protestants in a very fundamental way, there is a way in which this, like you know, view of the market and this view of the market as organic is really important to them.

C. Derick Varn: 49:10

And yet, even in an era where you have a weak state, like at least a weak federal state and actually some of the colonial governments are kind of strong but a weak federal state it seems like people are uneasy with this idea that there are power relationships imprinting that you can't just get rid of just because it's not formally censored by the church or the king or whatever. And in some ways, you know, like this little you know paper you presented actually brings out, in some ways the Europeans were ahead of us on this stuff because they were more willing to print in multiple languages for domestic markets, which we were profoundly uncomfortable with.

Michael Baysa: 49:58

Not just that religious. In most print houses in Europe are very interreligious. To you had Jews, protestants and Catholics being the same print store printing for other Jews, protestant and Catholics was here. It's predominantly Protestants who are upper. It's more, actually, all Protestants who are operating publishing houses or printing presses that you know we love. We love the exceptionalism that we are very religiously pluralistic nation, but that's not how it started. You are already behind the curve on that front. And what do we do with that right it's? It goes against sort of our founding origins and myths that we like to tell ourselves.

C. Derick Varn: 50:38

Right, we're religiously pure realistic as long as you aren't Catholic. And then we're religiously pure realistic as long as you aren't Catholic and maybe Jewish, although Jews are sometimes okay and sometimes not. You're religiously pure realistic, is I mean? The exception is always kind of glaring.

Michael Baysa: 50:58

There's a lot more exceptions to which is the thing I was tracked. So you know, jews are struggling to print in Hebrew here and one of the things that I sort of track in my project. I just I just wrote an article about this Like what do you make of? What do we make of the fact that there was only ever enough Hebrew in colonial printing presses for Protestant uses of Hebrew, but never enough for any safari to call any colonial Jews here? They almost always had to go through the trouble of importing from Lisbon or Amsterdam, despite the fact that the guy across the street from them has Hebrew type, but for some reason it's just never enough for them. It was never enough, so somehow publish some.

Michael Baysa: 51:43

My argument in this article is that publishers never saw colonial Jews as a potential users of their wares in a way that would ever accommodate or allow for them to print in any substantial text. And one of the things I was tracking was comparing like European productions to American productions, and the guy who was sort of at the thrust of this was this guy. His name is Judah Monus. He's a Harvard instructor. He was a Jew from Italy and he came here pitching himself as someone who could teach Hebrew and he agreed to convert and all these other things. But as soon as he tried to publish like a Hebrew textbook at Harvard, he realized, like you guys have no idea how to print anything in Hebrew, you don't have the wares for this, you don't have the heat.

Michael Baysa: 52:30

Despite the fact that Puritans were like, oh no, we're very good with our Bible, like we know our languages and things like that. But when he came here he was just like y'all don't have the right enough amount of text types. And so he had to, at a huge expense to Harvard, basically imported a ton of Hebrew text types. And the funny thing is that Harvard, the first set of types, came in and he was like this is not enough. You guys don't even know how much you need to produce a text in Hebrew. And so he had to do a second shipment and even then it was still a very sort of expensive project. But long story short, that instance sort of flagged for me that you know, even if you were to treat Hebrew as a language or as a live language rather than, I think a lot of folks would say, well, I don't know was it, was it a live language, I think? For for certain Jews it certainly was colonial Jews it was still a live language.

C. Derick Varn: 53:24

It was a live printing language, at least right.

Michael Baysa: 53:26

Right, yeah, they realized that. Oh, this is another valence of the printing press where clearly they didn't think we were someone who could use this for us.

C. Derick Varn: 53:37

Yeah, I've always thought about this is actually interesting. This is to me because I'm of Sephardic Jewish distraction, whose family has been here like part of my family has been here since before the fucking revolution and I always wondered like why is there no Jewish press in America, despite the fact there are fairly significant communities of Jews that have been here for three, 400 years that were important enough for, say, grant felt the need to kick them out of Atlanta, for example that yet we don't have. We don't have either a Ladino or a Hebrew print culture for, and in so much that we do have a print culture for them, they're masquerading it to look like Protestant stuff. Yeah, which is very interesting to me, that there's this whole Yiddishite culture that develops in the 20th century but you don't see any equivalent of that in the 18th or 19th at all.

Michael Baysa: 54:40

So I tried to track this and it brought me to a debate in London between I forgot who it was. I had this in a paper this is why historian brain sort of leaving my mind right now. But basically someone wanted to translate certain prayers from Hebrew to English and that actually was a very controversial move for Jews in London. Some of the rabbis are basically like no, we can't allow for this, this is not something we should be doing. No one should be engaging a printing press in London that's not affiliated with the synagogue, and so the reason this was controversial. There was a similar controversy that happened in New York when Isaac Pinto was trying to translate, I think, a Hebrew prayer in the morning for Rosh Hashanah. Similarly, he was also reluctant to translate in English. Eventually he does, but there was an anxiety among the Jewish diaspora about.

Michael Baysa: 55:45

We know that if we were to print this through the printing press translated into English, which we intended originally for our internal use because, of course, immigration story at some point second, third generation they're going to stop speaking like Ladino or whatever language their parents came here with. They're going to start speaking English instead. But there's an anxiety here about well, who else is going to read this. Who else is this going to be for? Could the printing press be something that we publish internally? Or, if we were to engage with English printers, they knew precisely that there is an English speaking audience that they're going to send this to, and is that something that we want our work to be out there for? And so, and also, there's also sort of an internal debate about, like you know, we just we were just allowed to settle here in London.

Michael Baysa: 56:37

We know that we were to print who knows what kind of who knows what Protestant out there is going to suddenly create a controversy through the presses and compromise our standing here.

Michael Baysa: 56:47

Because they also know that the printing press uses a site for, like, fake debate, like it inspires controversy, like, as soon as someone publishes, all these other ministers feel the need to suddenly, like, start printing something and like, speak for the people and then, you know, voice themselves and create a whole stirrup, a whole hullabaloo and a lot, and some Jews were also anxious about the fact that once they voice themselves in print, protestant culture is going to come in and tell them and, you know, find some reason to, you know, delegitimize, I guess, their public presence in that site in that way and so so all that to say, to go back to the original point, there is also an anxiety among Jews as to why they didn't want to present, because they knew that there was this broader culture that they would not be welcome to print in.

Michael Baysa: 57:33

And and those are just documents that I don't know historians also haven't paid attention to because they were not printed through the printing pluses. And I captured in our big sort of big scathing bibliographies of things that were printed only in America, which have been how historians write about the period. That's not the case anymore, but certainly the older historiography does that. But we are finding more and more Jewish manuscripts that were circulating in the colonies, so there is a robust they're just manuscripts.

C. Derick Varn: 58:02

That were printed.

Michael Baysa: 58:03

They're manuscripts. Some of them are printed but they weren't printed. Here Got it, and because of that, the kind of like domestic printing is the story of America. They were like oh no, no, no, no, that's not really part of the story. So we're finding more and more. New York Public Library has a lot of them and the U Penn has a collection of early America, judaica as well. So I've used a lot of their sources to sort of contrast, like domestic productions versus non-domestic productions. And why is it that it never happened here?

C. Derick Varn: 58:35

Well, that makes sense. I was thinking about that as we were talking because I was like, oh yeah, there is a lot of anxiety about Jews being like well, whatever we engage with Christians, be they Protestant or Catholic, and if it's too public we usually end up regretting it anyway. But it does seem like there is very. It is just interesting to contrast that culture with post German Diaspora, you know, yiddishite culture, which was very privately impressed, but in a very different context, in the early 20th century, so much so that people assume, incorrectly, that the the history of American Jewish culture is primarily Ashkenazi, which it is not. Yeah, exactly, and so it's.

C. Derick Varn: 59:28

It's a very interesting sort of problem and I think that this is interesting about, you know, this piece in De Puglia where we're looking at some of them, we're assuming like, oh, this had to be for a Catholic audience, but it wasn't really. I mean, it was actually, you know, it's, it's Tom Paine, but for, you know, but for the Catholics to de-Catholic them like, which you would think Americans would be very interested in, but they are not, and so that that is an interesting sort of thing to think about, and it does just prove that, like this narrative of the open marketplace of ideas that has that, like anyone can compete in this just their organic persuasiveness. That's horse poop. And it's funny because people realize that it's wrong today, but for some reason they feel like they need to believe it was true at some time, and that some time just happens to be just far enough back that it's hard for the average person to adjudicate whether or not it's true.

Michael Baysa: 1:00:32

Yeah, I got that question in my defense, if my dissertation defense or one of my faculty members asked me like but we know, of course, we know publishing is not this open space of ideas, like that's not true and I'm like I agree, but why do we treat the printing press as if it was, oh, it was an exception to that rule of the history? The entire history of any medium that there is always, it's always fraught. There's obviously power dynamics at play, there's cultural, law-standing, cultural hegemony that play in any medium, any form. Yeah, for some reason, this was the golden age, right, the myth of the golden age of the 18th century. Like the age of revolutions, like that's facilitated because of a free press, so to speak.

C. Derick Varn: 1:01:18

Well, it's interesting to me.

C. Derick Varn: 1:01:19

I think you mentioned that the age of revolutions actually is one of the things where why it would be maintained, because it's a narrative of, like, the revolutionary nature of early nationalism, that both the right and the left in America and the left, both liberal and Marxist, would be slightly invested in maintaining right Like this is one thing where there's a weird like trans-partisan agreement that, like, this was our revolutionary origins and things may be bad now, yeah, you know, like of course they're bad, and if you're a Marxist, of course they're bad.

C. Derick Varn: 1:01:53

Now it's over, you know, over-produced, karinaki Kavasi has led to bourgeois degeneration and butter-pattern Like, but they have a narrative for that. But there's there's like, well, the early revolutions, they really weren't revolutionary and you know, part of me would say like, yeah, they were, but they also aren't as revolutionary as you're portraying it. There's more continuity even if they aren't really revolutionary. Then you think, because the nature of both social power and the technology is more embedded in pre-existing power structures, then you're letting on. But I think that I think maybe that's why it's so hard to let go, because, yeah, everybody's like oh, we get it now. Even even conservatives, frankly, get it now because they're constantly complaining about social media.

Michael Baysa: 1:02:44

But you know, although that's a funny, very recent development, Well, they know that you know to go to X or Twitter, whichever tier, to want to hold on to they. I think they caught on to, I think, a dimension of technology that I think I'm also tracking my work, which is someone's in control of how the technology is supposed to function. Clearly, then, the goal is to you know, in a Marxian way like seize the means of discourse and production, right, so, of course, have somewhat. Someone is always managing it. Now, the question is how can you manage that?

Michael Baysa: 1:03:23

So, in the case of the Ashkenazi Jews, they knew they had to have their own printing press, apart from the governance of Anglo Protestant sort of governance, and so they, for them, that was the key. So, in the case of, in the case of today, they know I think both sides know that the stakes for most platforms more technologies always come down to who's really managing this platform, deciding what's accessible speech versus not acceptable speech in these spaces. I think there is a general, I don't know. My sense is there's a general contestant that everyone knows that's the game that has to be played and for some reason, again, we don't read that back into the time into time, despite the fact that was true. Yeah, I've even had debates.

C. Derick Varn: 1:04:11

I've had debates with leftists on this and recently, where I'm like this golden age of like free print culture in which the state was never like kind of back in sliding its hand and even though it was officially not involved, I don't know when you think that wasn't happening because the government prompted the Hayes code. The government prompted, I mean, I mean, fuck the first thing that like one of the first laws we deal with the alien and sedition acts, which is explicitly limiting print, despite by the federal government, clearly in violation of the costs, like not even kind of non violation of the Constitution. You know, even though we still have sedition acts now they're very mitigated and yet people somehow believe that like the state wasn't involved, that the other forms of social power, what involved that like I also think there's this, there's this one to believe in the secularity of the United States, you know, because it was not uniconfessional and and that's that's true, that kind of brackets out like dude. These former charters of that were also, you know, as I point out, these corporations were also, like the first limited liability corporations are often these, like British and Dutch exploratory committees.

C. Derick Varn: 1:05:38

They are public private partnerships, before we even fully have instantiated capitalism. But beyond that, even that irony, they were also tied into religious stuff. And have you know, for moment one, all those things were mixed together. And they didn't get unmixed magically because they put it in the Constitution, kind of sort of you know, in 1881 or whatever, it wasn't like they just woke up one day and all those power structures were undone, it's. It does lead to some interesting dynamics.

Michael Baysa: 1:06:15

The thing that I always push back on with the easy out for a lot of folks who don't want to say that that power is there, is for them that out is. Oh, it's a matter of demographics, it's. It's the only reason Protestants have a cultural power is because America is mostly Protestant, angle Protestant specifically, and I'm like I don't think that's a sufficient. And so the thinking and stark argument, the hatching, no sort of framing, has relied on sort of just demographics figures to say like look at all of these angle Protestants, of course this is why it ascended. That's the story. So the story to go to the secularization story, the battle then becomes sort of how many people were still Protestant at this time versus how many were not. But I agree with you in the sense of like no, I don't. I don't buy the demographic answer, because it's not like people just in mass stop Affiliating with the church, or it's not like people in mass stopped believing in a God, if you were to still adhere to sort of Protestant. And also, this is the thing about religion. Like, I come from a religious studies department, so we study religion culturally, which means that it's not just about beliefs and rational statements, it's about all these other ways that religion still suffuses our lives, even though we would not profess to be religious anymore, even if, you know, there's still cultural assumptions that we retain despite whatever ships we might make.

Michael Baysa: 1:07:44

My favorite example of this was there's this Catholic this is Puritan who became a Catholic. His name is John Thayer, so he had like a sort of pilgrimage moment where, you know, he was a Puritan here in the 18th century you know whether really Puritan still exists or not, he's within that line. But then he went. He went to Rome, became a Catholic, came back to Boston, determined to try and convert the nation, and one of the things that a lot of Catholics were sort of frustrated with him by was that he was not conducting himself in a way that Catholics in America conducted themselves, and by that I mean by that they mean he seems very combative for a Catholic, like why does he seem to want to engage in public debate all the time with all these, you know, sort of Protestant Puritan kind of folks in New England? And they attributed it to the fact that, no, at the end of the day, he's a Puritan. To be Puritan wasn't necessarily to be sort of, you know, profess Calvin, but for them to be Puritan means to be combative in the public sphere, like that's what it means to be Puritan, because for them that's how they saw the public sphere operating and so that sense there are ways that those sort of remnants still stuck with you in the kind of a variant way, maximum way.

Michael Baysa: 1:09:04

So to answer your question, that those it's those strands that I use for my research I'm interested in which is like, okay, religion. Folks would say religion doesn't operate here anymore, but I think it still shapes the way that people view the world and all these like really strange ways it retains power in sort of really strange ways. So one of the things that I've been, so one of the ways that I've had to prove like how does Protestant power still work for the presses was like, okay, if we were to name soft power right. So so to go back to the example, our states operating printing presses or are there, are publishers and printers still committed or have relationships with folks who work for the state or who whose customer base is maybe you know, big famous ministers who do keep their pockets, like who keeps their business alive with their occasional sermon, because sermons tend to be one of the most profitable kind of texts at the time. In what ways are those relationships also shaping publishers sort of decisions and students in terms of what they want to print versus what they do not want to print? So these are the only examples that I've seen where you know ministers would turn down print I mean not ministers, printers would print, turned down print jobs because they know that the minister that they've been printing for might not print with them anymore and if they were to publish this text.

Michael Baysa: 1:10:29

So you do have sort of soft connections with power in a way that does still shape the culture in truly fascinating ways, even if it's not the hard censorship or hard governmental oversight that I think we're more familiar with in terms of how these things still operate and how cultural Japanese should have upheld. Those are the connections that I've been like. Okay, at least empirically. These are some things. These are ways I can make a case for what, how these things still continue to persist despite, you know, secularization maybe, men, this, despite religion maybe not being a thing anymore, the regardless of these things, they still operate the human world with, with connections with, with their own commitments and things like that. So yeah, that's my loss.

C. Derick Varn: 1:11:23

Well, okay, one thing I wanted to ask you. This is a broader question than just your paper and it'll be our fun question for the day but, um, I want you to make a case of why someone like me who does a vaguely leftist podcast, or or someone who's just in popular cultural listening, why should they give a shit about religious studies? Because I think they should, for a variety of reasons, have nothing to do with religion. But I would like your pitch, because one of the things that you mentioned as you come out of religious studies program and like this, actually does say, weirdly, a lot about the development of technology. So, you know, just to give you a little little boost. But why? Why do you think people should care?

Michael Baysa: 1:12:12

Well, there are different ways I can pitch this, so different religious studies departments have their own kind of valence, but I'll give my, I'll give my own pitch, or I don't know. So, on the one hand, religious studies is kind of similar. It's very adjacent to anthropology in the sense that we are really, at the end of the day, studying how power is enacted between humans, how power is negotiated, contested, and how it's eventually encoded in in institutions and cultural products and things like that. The thing that religious studies kind of brings to the fore, though, or at least flags or highlights more, is how authority structures are also created and how that functions in the world. So, for example, so the, the popular answer is like how do celebrities, how do fandoms, you know, coalesce in a way, and so religious studies folks are very attracted to contemporary examples of how, how authority structures are constructed. So I know one that a lot of folks will eventually I don't know if this will catch me some black, but it's like Taylor Swift fans Like how is? How do you explain that phenomenon, right? So religious studies folks are very attuned to the dynamics that would create fandoms. Of course that's, that's in a popular culture sphere, but it also applies to political sphere, right? What are some rhetorical polls that certain politicians would make that draws certain religious groups, or at least allows them to see them under the same light as profits, or to see them under the same light as religious figures within their own tradition? So that's so. So, to answer your question, my pitch for religious studies is really like it's more tuned to operations of power in spaces where it doesn't seem like those should be operative, or at least in spaces where we don't think religion traditionally or you know, in a more theoretical frame, operates, when in fact it is.

Michael Baysa: 1:14:19

And so my favorite, the thing that draws me to religious studies is it always. One of my pet peeves is whenever people are surprised that religion is doing something in the world. Like you know. You know, most people's sort of narrative about Christian nationalism is like where did this come from? Like why is it? Why is it a thing now? And I would always say no, it's always been a thing. You just stopped looking at it. Like, or you think that secularization has answered the religious studies problem, and then it always. Then it comes up and you're always surprised, right. And so religious studies folks also have the tools to interrogate, how you know, publicly acknowledged religions still continue to shape culture in the world today. So what it does show up, we're not surprised, we're like no, this is what's been happening and maybe folks just haven't been paying attention that's sort of my pitch to more sort of secular left leaning folks who who tend to not want to take religion seriously until it becomes a thing. And then they're like oh, now we have to deal with it.

C. Derick Varn: 1:15:20

Yeah, it's fascinating that you bring up one of my favorite examples which is like oh, christian nationalism, like, honestly, guys, christian nationalism has kind of been a defied assumption in this country to a bit relatively recently. Yeah, and that's why you notice it Like it's actually what you really. To me, you're seeing a wounded bear and I think, while this particular former Christian Christian nationals will probably go away, this tendency probably won't Exactly, and I find that very interesting. Another thing I've learned from religious studies, particularly religious studies before the Renaissance, are to you are early modern period.

C. Derick Varn: 1:16:03

I'm going to use Renaissance here though, because I think it's actually clarifying Is you start seeing how religious studies is relevant when you realize that, like no, I had a concept of religion before, like the 15th century, like basically like religion, race, and religion, race and nation as governance model all kind of emerge at the same time and then you're like, well, but how do people think of it before? And I'm like that was just people's way of being and power and relations and embedded epistemologies and whatnot. Religion, weirdly, is a concept that only makes sense once you have a concept of secularization to separate it out. But that's misleading because you can see the same kind of dynamics all over the place that people just bracket as going away. So, like you know, we talk about the unchurch today, and I think it's. I think you know, yes, we live in a very unchurched society. I'm not here to judge whether that's good or bad. It's happened very quickly. I will say that it feels like the United States decided to play catch up with Europe in 10 years.

C. Derick Varn: 1:17:10

But at the same token, when people like view of that I don't know the very new atheist view that we're all going to be like good, secular, rationalist, humanist, and you know, sam Harrisites, like that's not what's happening at all and in fact, a lot of these weirder phenomenons of the unchurch, you know, my favorite, like hyperbolic example is secular people arguing that complaining about astrology is sexist or racist, depending on what they want. And I'm like, well, you know, we should not be surprised at this because it's a kind of emotive response that is tied to people's folk epistemologies in a way that we normally talk about with religion, but it's deinstitutionalized and free floating. So you see, these combinations of concepts from, like, the political world and the quasi-parareligious world in the case of astrology, that come together in a way that shouldn't surprise us at all if we like, look at the way, say, quote, religious people, unquote operate and think like, oh, we're not that fundamentally different from them. It's not that we're a different species just because we're secular.

Michael Baysa: 1:18:30

Yeah, the way I phrased it is that our posture towards certain things and the weight with which we value certain things, like if religion is simply the object of the things that we fixate on, then sure, you can secularize it all you want, but if what we're describing is a way of being a posture, like an apostrophe towards something, if that's what religion actually is, then I don't know. Did it go away Like, or did we just change the objects of our affection or objects of our worship, objects of things, with something else? I think that for me, has been the interesting kind of more amenable explanation, more sort of better example of like if we were taking an anthropological approach to what is it that human? If religion is what humans do, what is the thing that we're doing? What is the object that we're doing these to? Now, if it all consists of, like the religious project. So not religious project, but like that's all within the broader category of religion, or we were to expand it.

C. Derick Varn: 1:19:34

Yeah, so when I want to destroy your academic career but build up your clickbait career, I could have you write the article like how Taylor Swift is our new guy.

Michael Baysa: 1:19:46

Oh, I'm waiting for someone more established to do that, because I've seen the YouTube backlash on anyone to say anything about that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:19:56

So yeah, bugs both religious people and Swifties.

Michael Baysa: 1:19:59

Although I will say I paid my dues to the church of Taylor Swift. I watched the Arab store, so you know what. I could claim some sort of credibility there.

C. Derick Varn: 1:20:11

I mean it is interesting, I mean you can bring this up, and this will be my last point but like I really did understand fandoms more when I started applying religious studies paradigms to it. Now I was like, oh okay, like I get how this operates. And so you know, one of my big pushbacks in the last, say three or four years it's just like, yeah, you know, there is secularization in the sense that we are less churched right now. These religious institutions are, for whatever reasons, probably if the fall to both the economy and the internet or whatever, don't have the same stay in power Doesn't mean they're gone forever. They tend to come back, you know, just looking at the long deraille of history here. But beyond that, like those tendencies go somewhere.

C. Derick Varn: 1:21:07

And I think also another thing it does for me is demystify the religious stuff of the past, because you're like there's no separating that from nation building projects, from the creation of markets, from conspiracy, consumption and all that. That's in religion too. We shouldn't treat that as a separate sphere either. Like that duality goes both ways. So in that sense I think it's very interesting and I just want to give you religious intellectual history people credit, because I tended to ask you guys to come on the show after the conference because I thought that there was a lot of interesting stuff coming from the religious studies people that was much broader and just like what did Americans believe in 1850 or whatever, although I will admit from your panel there was a guy who was talking about 1850s concepts of religious aliens. That like kind of was like wait, there was alien culture in the 1850s. This is not a 1950s UFO cult phenomenon. Tell me more.

Michael Baysa: 1:22:16

Yeah, most of us religious studies folks. We also like the weird things, and so that's the yeah, whatever. The things that really catch our eye are like cult shows on Netflix, shows about cults. Then we're like, all right, we're all going to put a panel together and we're going to talk about it, because really it's the groups that are at the boundaries of the category of religion that most fascinate us. How are they breaking apart this category that we sort of invented and expanding it, but also challenging it, because there is a kind of like there's still Christian valence to what religion is. It's Protestants who are obsessed with belief and it's belief that becomes the primary metric for something being religious or not religious, and we're still trying to move away from that.

C. Derick Varn: 1:23:04

But yeah, yeah, whenever someone brings it up, I always bring up hey, buddhism is a religion, except for those weirdos who try to secularize it. But all the people who do the interaction using weirdly Protestant Christian missionary talking points. But beyond that, if Buddhism is a religion, why aren't ancient Greek philosophies religion? Because they have the same categories and people are like what I'm like? Well, just because we took all the God stuff out didn't mean it wasn't there and even for the Greek stuff.

Michael Baysa: 1:23:38

the God stuff informed a lot of that, so it was as much our project to make the God stuff not be part of it, rather than reflecting actually what Greeks and Romans themselves had. Oh yeah, I mean.

C. Derick Varn: 1:23:52

I don't think either platonic or Aristotelian metaphysics makes sense if you don't have an unmoved mover or a source of all forms, or this idea, In Plato's case, the pre-existence of all souls and all knowledge, which you just wake it up to through gradual removal of defilements, which I'm just like, it's just like. If that doesn't strike you as religious, then you don't know what I don't know what you think religion is. And also there's a reason why people got burnt at the stake, Not about science, which is a misunderstanding of Galileo, but science stepping on theology, because it messed with Aristotle. That's what they were mad about. Frankly, they didn't give a crap about whether the earth was, I mean the kind of dip, Not really. When you read, for example I was just recently reading some stuff from Galileo, I was just talking about this techno-optimist and martyr for science narrative. Not only did all that stuff not happen, that's all protestant and secular propaganda from like 200 to 400 years later.

C. Derick Varn: 1:25:12

What did happen is even weirder than you think, because what seems to get him in trouble is him taking the side of Aristotle, and that bothers him. Not because the cosmological stuff are discrediting the Bible, which I do not seem to care about at all it's because it has implications for theology, and who can adjudicate theological truth? That's what they're mad about. And then you're like, oh, this is not like. This all has tied in implications. And if you don't understand religious thinking, or if you think it's just religion and science and never the Twain shall meet some non-overlapping magisteria stuff or whatever, you're not going to understand what was at stake. Or you're going to think they're mad about things they weren't actually mad about.

Michael Baysa: 1:25:58

That's why a lot of religious studies folks are having to do a lot of the legwork. So religion and science is a popular kind of course, but a lot of those courses that they're trying to teach really is breaking apart. Still, these pregnant narratives about religion versus science and a lot of them are delving into history, showing that the two overlap and the concerns and conflicts between you two never revolve around actual cosmological claims, I think, as you said. So hopefully there's a lot of people doing that work. But it's also hard to go against sort of popularizers of science who would propagate that narrative because it feeds the sort of progressive narrative that they have about contemporary movement. At least that's my hypothesis of what's going on. That I don't know. It does more of a disservice, I think, than not.

Michael Baysa: 1:26:51

And you mentioned the new atheist movement. Actually, that was a starting point for me doing religious studies. Eventually that's what got me as a little kid to basically be like do I know my theology? What's going on here? And none of their sort of declarations about eventual secularization materialized. Yeah, they're all reckoning with it, which is really fascinating.

C. Derick Varn: 1:27:14

It's like, yeah, you guys are right that people don't go to church anymore, but you were not right at all about what it meant. And it's an interesting sort of yeah for me too. I came out of that, but for me it was that, and for me also realizing that I had misunderstood the ancient world because the 19th. There was two things in the 18th and 19th century, which was one we got to make the ancient world white, because it wasn't, they didn't have a concept of that. And two, we got to make this Greek philosophy secular, so that it's competition with Christianity in the early in the dark ages, which no one uses anymore. I'm just putting that in there.

Michael Baysa: 1:28:04

I hope so. I saw two tweets on the dark ages, the chart that I think everyone sort of circulates. I'm just like, oh, this again, this again.

C. Derick Varn: 1:28:14

Yeah, it's funny. It's like if you hang out with medievalists you say the word dark ages, they're going to pull out that, but like everybody kind of believes it. And it's interesting to me because it betrays how even people who ostensibly have given up on the myth of progress, a lot of the 1970s, still basically have a Wiggish progressive framework and not even like a you know, from my perspective a dialectically complicated one. It's just like history gets better. I don't know what you're talking about. The past was awful and the future's great, and I'm like the past and the current are less different than you think. There are pretty big differences. I'm not saying there's not, but one of the things that you're working to end this off of is tied into.

C. Derick Varn: 1:29:12

Religious studies too is like one of the things. When you study religion and technology, you realize like technology itself is never entirely neutral and kind of can't be, like there's no way for it. It always develops in a context. So with that notion, we need to look at what those contexts are before we think like yeah, like oh, there was the printing press and it led to the free market of ideas, whatever the hell that is, or whatever I mean. We see this today, and it's easy for people today to see the problems that they're living through, but somehow not apply it to the past, as if you know.

Michael Baysa: 1:29:50

So why do you think that is? That's the thing I'm always curious, trying to diagnose. I think you flagged in the beginning like oh, there's really great scholarship. It just doesn't make its way to public school, to you know text, books and things. I wonder, maybe that's part of it, but I don't know if you've identified maybe other channels as to why certain narratives are just hard to discard.

C. Derick Varn: 1:30:11

Some of it is a formalization of disciplines that we teach in public school, like, basically the American curriculum was more or less set at the end of World War II and has changed, except in science very little, and even in science not as much as you would think, while there are different valiances of progressive versus conservative narratives on that content, the content itself really we're talking about valences on the content. There's the whole swaths of stuff we don't really talk about from the New England Indian wars with the Puritans that are just somehow bracketed out even in quote. I mean, you know, it's funny when they're like when I hear this and they're like blue state schools and I'm like, look like I don't know a school in California that teaches the actual history of like Puritan indigenous wars at all or like the enslavement of indigenous people and when that failed, that's when the English started getting into the Portuguese and Spanish transatlantic slave trade. But it was, you know, their first option was to enslave local people and that just didn't really work for them and stuff like that. Like that's completely absent from most school discourses.

C. Derick Varn: 1:31:31

You know about the reality of history, but I also think everybody kind of wants to believe their time is special and like this is one of these things where, you know, yeah, I have a largely Marxist audience, but I know this is gonna bother my Marxist audience because I kind of see that trans historically, like I find evidence of people can play, like, as soon as people are writing down, they're writing down about how, a this is either better or worse than the past and B, and you know it's gonna either continue getting better or continue declining into the future. So we're at a unique point right now and, you know, part of me goes like, well, if everything is unique and special like that, then really nothing is. And so, like you know, yes, it's different, but this whole like decline or progress narrative is actually confusing. But it seems like something that we, as soon as we get language and history to do it, do it almost immediately. Yeah, and that doesn't seem like there's a lot of stuff we can blame on Christianity or in Western culture, et cetera, but that one doesn't seem to be it Like that, like, yes, there's, you know there's a.

C. Derick Varn: 1:32:51

You know the West has a linear narrative and, like you know, like the Darmic religions don't, but there is still this like sense of rise and decline in each age being special, even in those societies before European, like extensive European contact in well, I say before extensive European contact, which of course itself is bullshit because we all know about, like the Greco Indian kingdoms and the Silk Road or whatever but still before contact with modern Christian thought. That would impose this linear narrative on it and you can blame it on that. I find that interesting and I find it kind of all over the place. It does, it does change over time. Now does that tell us why we do it? No, I don't really have a good reason why we do it. I sometimes get all like is this just some weird, like I don't know weird product of apes with language that we have to like, do things and compare it to something to have any idea of what the current is? I have no idea. I'm curious.

Michael Baysa: 1:33:58

So you? Well, so you, you, you got a, an English degree right, or your background is in English. My background is in English and Anthology.

Michael Baysa: 1:34:06

So yeah, oh, okay, I'm curious about genres and so so one of the things that I, because I work in early modern period, I have to engage with English lit folks on, like, and it was asked like oh, why are you all so obsessed with the novel, or why are you all obsessed with the Jeremiah as a kind of way of structuring narratives and things like that. And I think a lot of the cases that they've made sort of I found somewhat convincing in the sense that our modes of narrating certain ways of being in the world was shaped by these sort of previous ways of relating to the past, how we situate ourselves in our environment. So I don't know if I would, yeah, I don't know if I would say like, christianity still shapes our collective senses of how we tell our stories. But there's something interesting about the Jeremiah structure, for example, where you would say look, look, look where we were back then and, in the immediate past, look how far we've fallen. And it's because we have all like.

Michael Baysa: 1:35:13

This is me talking out of my field, so I think this is a great song, but it's like yeah, look, the reason that things have fallen is because we have fallen away in all these ways.

Michael Baysa: 1:35:22

So in order to correct it. We must be self-reflective but then look to a transcendent reality that will correct course for us. And I found that interesting because I guess I've done like my own sort of anecdotal experiment, wondering if that mode of narration works outside of like registers really well, outside of English speaking audiences. And I've been able to do that and I've gotten some like weird looks whenever I've spoken to folks in the Philippines narrating sort of my own positionality for all to the nation. And I went and they're just like what are you talking about? I'm just like, oh, is this a genre that's just not, that's specific to a particular kind of lineage, or maybe we've been trained into this particular mode of thinking through public schools and things like that. So I think there might be something there. But if you were to ask me to empirically like pin it down, I don't think I can.

C. Derick Varn: 1:36:25

I do think about. So to get to you like I think about this in religious studies, make sure you in anthropology just to actually very aware of discourse patterns, like one of the things you notice in anthropology is like modern, post-european people tend to think of humans as animals and there's this non-person that we all kind of basically are, whereas you look at other narrative structures you see that like well, the great majority of people have actually kind of thought the opposite, that animals were people and that not like, or that they were not, they were persons like us entirely, although that sometimes they literally do think that. But that like there is a reciprocality in like the entire world, like the anthropocentrism is the same in the sense that there's both. It's both an anthropocentric point of view, but the way that it articulates that is almost the opposite. It's like, well, of course, like we have relations to deer, aren't they persons Like? And that's a narrative Like, that's a narrative comprehensiality. And if you look at like the grand, like if you were just to categorize society anthropologically, there's more societies that do the animals as persons than the other way around.

C. Derick Varn: 1:37:46

And even Western societies have tended to kind of kind of have it both ways where we articulate like fairy tales and stuff to children that way, and then we kind of like talk about animality as this like thing of which, like oh, we're all you know, we're all animals, even someone like David Graber who gets mad. Oh well, why are you comparing people to monkeys? And I'm like well, because like we are monkeys, like I'm just, you know, just taxonomically speaking. Well, we work great apes.

C. Derick Varn: 1:38:14

Excuse me, we don't have tales, but like it's that is interesting that even someone is anthropologically informed as Graber, would still have trouble with that because of the dominant narratives that were kind of his view of the implication of their narratives, even though you know there are plenty of anthropologists who study biological anthropology who don't actually really have separated themselves from the narrative of animality is somehow fundamentally like lesser than or different from us. And that's all about narration and that's all about like genre. One of the interesting things to me, for example, and thinking about the ancient world, is thinking about the differences in genres and then how we weed genres weirdly so like one of the things you notice about modern American people is they're always trying to read ancient epic poetry because it's narrative driven, like it's a novel.

Michael Baysa: 1:39:05

Right.

C. Derick Varn: 1:39:07

Absolutely not. It doesn't follow those patterns at all. Another example is like people getting really frustrated with dialectic material from the ancient world because it's all like kind of skewed dialogues, like they just don't seem realistic to us and I'm like but that's not just a genre of the ancient Greeks, that's a genre you see all over the place in the ancient world and it does presuppose certain patterns of narrating the way you deal with ideological or epistemological conflict and so like these are important and I kind of hate that I have to do this. But the only way I can often get people to say take this stuff seriously is just to call this stuff technologies. These are narrative technologies and everyone's like oh, and I'm like oh God.

Michael Baysa: 1:40:04

Yeah, that is the move for in technology studies though it is to flag like oh, not that everything is a technology, but you sort of brought it to horizon Our technology becomes a helpful framework for flagging and clarifying for people like it's a tool. Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:40:23

It's like oh yeah, and I'm like, yeah, this whole idea of tools as machines versus tools as languages and stuff. It really breaks people's minds a little bit, but it is a way to get people to start looking at this. But to me, that also says something about our culture that I have to be like. This is a tool. A tool is a technology. Therefore, you can think of it like we think of machines not quite being weird and start analyzing this, and there's something rhetorically interesting about me having to do that to get you to take it seriously.

Michael Baysa: 1:40:58

I need to think about it with a critical lens rather than just looking for granted and assuming it's a natural thing, Right?

C. Derick Varn: 1:41:06

And in this sense there's so much. We assume that in the very old Marxian sense it's just naturalized. We're like the naturalization of that is an ideology.

Michael Baysa: 1:41:14

Right, exactly.

C. Derick Varn: 1:41:17

And I got really into that at the end of the new A5 discourse. I don't know if you were in school you would have almost had to have been, but maybe you were an undergrad or whatever. They were even trying to do this in English courses. We're going to talk about the evolutionary structure of the novel narrative as a trans-historical development of evolution, like that was a thing that popped up for about 15 minutes in narrative studies and then went away. I was like but it was very interesting from 2007 to 2012. This was when the Maddox was being discredited kind of as a field of study. And then there was all this like well, our narrative forms come from evolutionary psychology, so they're like trans-historical.

Michael Baysa: 1:42:04

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:42:07

And there were literary scholars trying to argue this, and it literally took a couple of people who were more developed in my field to study than me, who actually went and got doctorate to me, who were like no, stop it. Narrative patterns are not that consistent that you can say that there's somehow genetic modules. You might can say that about the very basics of grammar, but you can't say it about genres, and yeah, I think that's interesting. That does give me some clarity, though, about why progress and regress narratives may be so important for people to have an understanding of what they are, because it does add in some kind of narrative conflict that is comprehensible, about change, which may make your own society comprehensible to you, even though it's also doing so at a cost to the ability to comprehend the future of the past.

Michael Baysa: 1:43:14

Right, or to relate with and to develop some healthy relationship with the past, which the Puritans are horrible with. And I see a similar pattern within the sense of like no, we discard the past is always worse and I'm always like no.

C. Derick Varn: 1:43:36

So yeah, yeah Well, thank you so much, michael. If people were interested in finding your work, I know you're primarily a young scholar, so there might not be a lot out there, but where could they find?

Michael Baysa: 1:43:47

your work, just Google. Yeah, I have a Twitter. My Twitter handle is Michael Bysa at Michael Bysa. It's pretty straightforward, but yeah, I think I've only published one paper so far and a bunch of book reviews, but hopefully the project on the printing print the religious history of the printing press in early America will be out I don't know, two years maybe. So keep an eye out on that, I guess.

C. Derick Varn: 1:44:15

Yeah, when that comes out, we'll probably have you back when we talk about this in a larger and a longer delay format. Thank you so much.

Michael Baysa: 1:44:23

Yeah, for sure, all right. Thanks, derek, appreciate it.