Originally delivered as the 2021 H. Paul Douglass Lecture: The Meaning of American Progress: Race, Science, and Redemption Religious Research Association

As the United States ponders 250 years of nationhood, I have returned to my 2021 H. Paul Douglass Lecture, delivered at the Religious Research Association’s Annual Meeting, to help contextualize where the nation stands today. As I argued then, America’s citizenry, researchers, and academics should be thinking seriously about “American progress,” since the concept is vital to shaping American democracy in the present and for the future. Two hundred fifty years of American peoplehood have been knitted together from diverse racial and ethnic groups—White Americans, Black Americans, Indigenous peoples, Asian Americans, and numerous other communities—and by individuals at different stations in life. The lecture foregrounds this nationhood through American civil-religious and exceptionalist traditions, and more specifically, through studying U.S. peoplehood from an African American perspective. That perspective is shaped by two lenses: the group’s strivings toward progress and the constitutional challenges that continue to thwart it. “We the People,” a civil-religious and exceptionalist concept symbolizing American nationhood, becomes the site where questions, problems, paradoxes, and ironies emerge—particularly when viewed through the disruption posed by Black American bodies denied humanity, neglected, and experimented on, yet yielding new knowledge and information that advance the fields of science and medicine.