In the book Invoking the Fathers, Sarah Kornfield informs and challenges assumptions in the prevailing collective memory of America’s Founding Fathers. Through rigorous rhetorical analysis that will benefit readers inside and outside the academy, she revisits our understanding of this highly influential trope in ways that lead us to revisit our understanding of America and citizenship today.
If you are familiar with recent reports of a gender gap in politics, the revigorated market for masculinity, and the pushback against “woke” in the internet “broverse,” you might not expect people like me to like Kornfield’s latest book. However, this White, heterosexual, cisgender male, Christian father really likes this book. It is a model of rhetorical criticism performed at the highest level. It also holds important lessons about America’s past and present for all of us.
Invoking the Fathers is a challenging book in all the best ways. Through a disciplined analysis of the use of the Founding Fathers trope in congressional speeches, Kornfield opens our minds to the causes and consequences of this common metaphor. Much like a high school biology class brings a deeper understanding to naive students about how the natural world works and the impact of toxins and epigenetics on seemingly simple activities, Kornfield’s Invoking the Fathers carefully and clearly discloses some key elements in American political discourse that influence our national perceptions and common life. While many of us are familiar and comfortable with political discourse that invokes the Founding Fathers, rhetorical critical scholars are called to reveal the function and impact of common discourses so that we can make choices to improve our perceptions and lives. Kornfield fulfills this calling.
Kornfield operates from the understanding that words matter. Her book builds on this understanding by demonstrating how the grouping of words into tropes matters. More specifically, Invoking the Fathers takes the metaphor Founding Fathers seriously, showing ways the metaphor shapes our understanding of America’s beginning and, therefore, the meaning of the nation and our perceptions of what it means to be faithful citizens today. Kornfield shows us how one of our favorite tropes is not neutral and is “not innocent.”
In Invoking the Fathers, Kornfield investigates a staggering number of texts, congressional speeches from over the nation’s history, to carefully identify the use of the metaphor Founding Fathers. Given the changes in culture and contexts, the regional diversity of Representatives and Senators, and the periods of political polarization in our nation, it is notable that Kornfield found consistent and frequent use of the trope, suggesting the power that it holds in the national imagination. The Founding Fathers metaphor creates a collective memory of how our nation began. It tells the story that America exists because masculine, wealthy, White Christians in traditional families created it. While not historically accurate, this collective memory becomes a reality for the nation in which these imagined founders hold the highest authority for our understanding of the nation. Furthermore, in the narrative afforded by this trope, we inherited the nation from these men and have an obligation to retain or restore the nation that we imagine these Founding Fathers passed on to us to steward.
While Kornfield aptly notes how this collective memory afforded by the Founding Fathers trope fails to reflect the historical reality, she also reveals some of the damage it continues to do to our nation’s collective experience. Most notably, this metaphor privileges certain kinds of Americans over others. We imagine that those fathered by the founders look like the founders. Through this metaphor, we understand real Americans, or at least the great Americans, as masculine, wealthy, White Christians in traditional families. Furthermore, many who feel obligated to safeguard the nation inherited from these Founding Fathers feel obligated to mold a nation in their imagined image.
Like many Christians, I regularly pray the confession, “In your compassion, forgive us our sins, known and unknown, things we have done and things we have failed to do.” Kornfield’s Invoking the Fathers is both a source of and an answer to this prayer. As a White, heterosexual, cisgender male, Christian father, I should recognize my value as a child of God and a member of a community, and I must also recognize that I am not worthy of worship nor the centering of public life to the exclusion of my fellow humanity. I highly recommend Invoking the Fathers to anyone interested in navigating the current moment in American history or improving their understanding and practice of rhetoric, politics, or religion.
One Response
Fantastic! Thank you, James Vining and Sarah Kornfield!!!!