Hijacking History: Tragedy Appropriation, Philosemitism and Holocaust narratives in a Christian Sect

• In Event: Sociology of Culture Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): 15. Religion & Cultural Consumption

Abstract

There have been numerous studies examining the negative impacts of cultural appropriation. However, research surveying the appropriation of tragic historical narratives is more sparse and less well-defined. While some research exists in which authors note narrative theft by dominant social groups against marginalized populations, there has been little to no attempt to systematize and generalize this phenomenon. In this paper, I seek to expand upon current understandings of appropriation and posit the term tragedy appropriation to describe narrative theft at the group level. To explore this idea, I study Word of Faith Fellowship (WOF), a female-led philosemetic Evangelical Christian church that operates a Holocaust museum. I predict that WOF leaders chose to open a museum on this topic to appropriate the Holocaust narrative for their own agenda. I conducted content analysis of the church and museum websites, Google reviews, and visited the museum in person to answer this question. Findings suggest that the group uses philosemitism and tragedy appropriation to pursue church legitimacy and control their adherents.

Author

• Olivia C Summers, University of South Carolina-Columbia