PULLMAN, Wash. – Matthew Avery Sutton, Washington State University associate professor of history, has won the Organization of American Historians’ Binkley-Stephenson Award, which is given annually for the best scholarly article in the Journal of American History.
Sutton’s article – “Was FDR the Antichrist? The Birth of Fundamentalist Antiliberalism in a Global Age” (March 2012) – makes a fresh contribution to understanding the conservative turn in American politics, according to the award committee. The article shows how the crisis of the worldwide economic depression of the 1930s spurred apocalyptic thinking among American fundamentalists.
The committee was particularly impressed by the article’s creative framing, which packages the subject in a way that speaks to scholars in a range of fields.
Drawing on a wide range of religious publications and personal correspondence from the period, Sutton demonstrates that it was the development of ideas and networking that took place during the Great Depression that explains the establishment, in the next decade, of the politically powerful National Association of Evangelicals.
While the formation of this organization is often perceived as the beginning of politically engaged conservative religion, Sutton argues persuasively that it first emerged in the 1930s from the same cauldron of economic catastrophe and new thinking as modern liberalism. In this way, he challenges standard interpretations that assume the rise of the religious right was a reaction to the Cold War and/or to the cultural liberalism of the 1960s and 70s.
Founded in 1907, the OAH is the largest learned society and professional organization dedicated to the teaching and study of the American past. The OAH promotes excellence in the scholarship, teaching and presentation of American history and encourages wide discussion of historical questions and equitable treatment of all practitioners of history.
Members in the United States and abroad include college and university professors; students; precollegiate teachers; archivists, museum curators; and other public historians employed in government and the private sector.