Historian Kathleen Belew of Northwestern University discussed the origins of the current political division in the United States during this year’s Peter C. Schaehrer ’65 Memorial Lecture in Peace and Conflict Studies, “Home at the End of the World: Fear, Faith, and Crisis of Community in Suburbs,” on Sept. 24.
The author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Harvard, 2019), Belew received her PhD from Yale University and is a leading expert on radical right-wing extremism. Her latest book, Home at the End of the World: Fear, Faith, and the Crisis of Community in American Suburbs, focuses on Colorado in the 1990s and examines how high-profile crimes, apocalyptic religious ideologies, and mass shootings altered America’s relationship with violence.
Belew began by explaining how the April 20, 1999, Columbine shooting became a historical turning point, when the public began to accept gun violence as normal. The Denver suburbs were built around racial fears, concerns over crime, and anxieties about the Cold War, with highways contributing to subdividing urban communities resulting in sprawl and isolation, she said.
The discredited “super predator” theory of the mid-1990s and the JonBenét Ramsey case in Boulder helped fuel these fears, Belew noted, as white suburban children were subjected to surveillance-based protection narratives, such as fingerprinting drives — normalizing catastrophic thinking rather than providing genuine safety.
Belew also described the toll of school shootings on the nation since Columbine, noting that in 2018 the number of schoolchildren and teachers killed in mass shootings surpassed the number of military personnel killed in combat, and that by 2020 firearms became the leading cause of death for American children.
Meanwhile, the Public Religion Research Institute estimates about a third of American Christians identify as Christian nationalists, who hold among their beliefs that God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of society, the government should declare America a Christian nation, and U.S. law should be based on Christian values, she said.
“This movement would come to have an outsized impact on present day American politics and comes directly from Columbine,” Belew said. “And by that I mean both the shooting and the social fissures that allowed the shooting and its response.”
She explained how a 1989 tax loophole exempting churches and parachurch organizations from property taxes spurred a boom in religious construction, attracting organizations such as Focus on the Family and Summit Ministries as well as megachurches such as New Life Church, led by Ted Haggard. Belew said these churches grew from small gatherings to multicampus operations, providing infrastructure for more extreme politics.
This gave rise to the Seven Mountains or Dominionist movement, Belew said, which holds that Christians must seize control of seven areas of society: business, government, family, religion, media, education, and entertainment. By 2023, more than 50% of Dominionists believed the church should be able to veto any law not aligned with the Bible.
“Evangelicals weren’t interested in exclusionary laws of this kind at the beginning of the 1990s,” she said. “They were interested in mission trips, they were interested in helping each other, they were interested in a number of other projects.”
Belew sees several benefits in interrogating the narratives of America’s recent past. “When we realize how profoundly fear — both real and imagined — has created barriers and divisions, caused harm, and damaged and closed off avenues for change, we can together begin to do the work of grieving what was lost,” Belew said. “Most importantly, we can restore our capacity to imagine alternatives.”
Each year, the Peace and Conflict Studies program invites a world-renowned scholar to give the Peter C. Schaehrer ’65 Memorial Lecture on topics addressing some of the most important issues of peace and conflict facing the world today. The Schaehrer Initiative and Memorial Lecture Series was established by classmates of Pete Schaehrer ’65 — a career educator and a champion of civil rights. A reception followed the lecture in Love Auditorium, and Belew also participated in an academic seminar with faculty, students, and alumni the following morning.