 F look at the ascetics of the art life of the Bible, which sits alongside an understanding of national identity that focuses on material phenomenon. The nationhood is performed and produced in everyday physical activities and in and through material objects. My approach reflects a long-standing emphasis on national identities as imagined as Hugh has already mentioned, but also the more recent turn to conceptualising national identity in terms of what has been called banal nationalism or everyday nationalism. The ways in which identity is worked out in the individual and repeated habitual activities of everyday life, the eating of certain foods, the playing of certain music, the clothes that we wear. These markers and producers of national identity are perhaps most evident to foreigners and foreigners themselves are often identifiable by their inability to authentically replicate gestures and tastes. It is often in the unsaid then that the apparatus of national coherence and identification takes place and I will argue that the national identities of the US and the UK are based a significant extent on a Protestant aesthetics that was originally grounded in theologies of scriptural access. What I am looking at is therefore an indirect relationship between scriptures and national identity. Mae'r argument is that where scriptures do not have a direct or explicit relation to national identity or public policy, which scriptures often do, albeit indirectly, no, which... when scriptures do not have a direct or explicit relationship to national identity or public policy, they still influence policy making. The people who govern the USA and Britain at least will have been influenced by the Bible, not only through the possibilities of personal faith, But because of its influence upon the historical formation of their national identities and how that national identity is habitually practised and I want to spend the next half of this paper explaining what I mean by this. Scholars have paid attention to how English and American national identities are indebted to Bible's narrative of the chosen people. For example, works by Adrian Hastings and Sakfan Byrch awakach Byrch awakach has written on the debt American identity owes to the puritan mindset ..a fyrdd y gallwn i ymdyniad Cotyn Mabur.. ..aeth gilydd i'r sefyllfa'r enthau ymddianydd mewn cyfnodau... ..y'r grwp o'r ffordd y llawr tylliannol. Ymgyrch gydag o'r tariyf o'r llawr ffordd... ..a'r ffordd o'r eich cyfnod â ymddianydd mewn... ..a'r sefyllfa'r rydw i'r gondol ym 2012? Ychydig o boblau, yn cyfnodau yn cydynig.. ..y'r ffordd o'r ymddianydd mewn cyfnodau a'r nashnallu... is a difficult and unpopular line of inquiry for an area of study suspicious of reifying an exceptionalist narrative. American studies in its move away from American exceptionalism means that the significance of this historical puritan identity so tied up with ideas of the chosen nation and the US's world saviour has become an unsavory area for study. And the solution to the problem of exceptionalism according to this way of thinking seems easy. It's just a conscious rejection of the idea of the chosen people. A common assumption in scholarship is that the influence of puritanism and Protestant theologies are seen as intellectual choices or positions that may therefore be consciously adjudicated. A writer such as Leah Greenfeld for example sees early national sentiment as only expressed merely clothed in religious terms. So that religion becomes the clothing to the body of core beliefs of democracy and individualism in the English Civil War. Religion is easily discarded as not essential to national identities. This separation of national identity and religion continues in studies of secularisation. Many recognise that the foundations of nations such as the UK and US were steeped in biblical scriptures but because secularisation prioritises the realm of ideas they present limited explanations how to trace the heritage of the nation's scriptural basis. Many modernist theories of national identity such as Benedict Anderson date national identity to the French American revolutions of the 18th century. This modernist starting point links national identity to enlightenment values of liberty and freedom, the great rallying cries of these two nations. In ways that I think promotes the more palatable elements of national identities and explains why the modernist theory of nationalism held sway for such a long time. With the more recent surge of interest in political theology and the influence of people such as Carl Schmidt, Michelle Foucault, Walter Benjamin, George O. Gambon and the turn to questions of sovereignty, the normative dating of the nation state seems to have been pushed back to the early modern period and to key thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes. Yet scholars who do trace national identities to their Protestant foundations normally do so in terms of ideas, that political ideas are secularised theology, as Carl Schmidt put it, or that capitalism emerges from the Protestant work ethic for Max Weber. In all of this work, habitual values are rarely reflected upon. Recognition of the imagined, banal and everyday nature of nationalism is now fairly commonplace and yet there is little tracing of how everyday habitual activity relates to tradition. How this habitual activity of aesthetic norms is related to the Protestant foundations of these two national identities. One way in which theologies are secularised is through their concrete socialisation in a specific historical moment of course. The literal meaning of secularism is era or age. What I look at in tracing the history of the aesthetic of simplicity, as I will go on to do very shortly, is then the movement of theological content into aesthetic form that carries forward the logic if not the details of the theology from which it emerges. A focus on material and aesthetic habitual activity including aesthetic preference is vital because it functions I think as a vehicle of historical attitudes. Habitual activity carries forward logic when any conceptual affirmation of those concepts has waned. If we focus on the dual meanings of aesthetics as denoting both the visual object and the experience of the object from its original meaning in German, then we can think of the aesthetic object and our experiences of it in terms of an ongoing habitual repetition along the lines of Borgia's habitus. Borgia's focus of interest is in the schematic models provided by past practice, he says. The habitus, a product of history, produces individual and collective practices, more history in accordance with the schemes generated by history. It ensures the active presence of past experiences, which deposited in each organism in the form of schemes of perception, thought and action, tend to guarantee the correctness of past practices and their constancy over time, more reliably than all formal rules and explicit norms. Habitus, the continuation of familiar practice and norms, provides the active presence of past experiences that he locates in schemes of perception, thought and action. As such, we can look at puritan schemes of perception, thought and action as embedded in the aesthetic and habitus that is simplicity. Such a turn to material and aesthetic analysis is vital to address the ongoing privileging of a model of ideology and ideas that are primarily or solely cognitive, how we think about our identities, what we consciously believe or are sent to. To look at our sensuous material and habitual life and its relation to fundamental values is crucial I think because it is in those, it is in habituated and material selves that illogical prejudices are located. And it is these illogical prejudices that cannot be merely consciously rejected. But as I hope as this paper will demonstrate, need in the first place to merely be identified. National identities today are overwrot with prejudicial attitudes. Prejudicial enmity is not a surprising aspect of national identity of course because any group identity is founded on a sense of insider and outsider status. If as Carl Schmidt and others have argued that central to national identity is the enemy and friend distinction, then it becomes vital to be able to identify the enemy. Yet if the enemy is identified only through their appearance, their aesthetic or habitus, a visual or cultural prejudice that seems not to be waning, then it is crucial to give attention to those illogical prejudices that identify the enemy and maintain a coherent national identities. National identity may of course be consciously measured against a set of priorities, laws, principles or characteristics, but often affiliation works in more and conscious in automatic ways. Policies are advocated or ejected where it is compatible or incompatible with the nation's ideals because they are obviously unfair or because that's just not the way things are done here. Judgements are based on dispositions or taste as measures on evidence or rational argument. It is the shared cultural ideas of what is ethically or morally right, what makes it the American or British way that interests me. For example in 2016, in response to the European refugee crisis in Britain, British Prime Minister David Cameron repeatedly used the phrases such as Britain is a compassionate country, Britain is a moral nation, anticipating a shared agreement on unarticulated core values. He just expected his audience to know what compassion and morality look like. National identity to the extent of its outworkings in public policy is based upon shared ideals of human wellbeing, justice and fairness. Research has revealed that policy making is implemented less often on evidence based research than we might hope. The research of Catherine E. Smith for example has shown that it is persuasive stories that make it into public policy. Stanford University states on its website for its postgraduate public policy course that whilst policy analysis must always aspire to rationality, the ultimate subject of analysis is individual and collective human behaviour, much of which is founded on emotion and instinct. What undergirds policy making then is often emotion and instinct, not rationality or doctrine. My argument is therefore that the realm of aesthetics, what Coleridge described as coincidence of form, feeling and intellect, has played a larger role in the history of western culture and national identity that is often recognised. Scriptural aesthetics and Protestantism are well known to be anti-aesthetic. Indeed Protestantism embraced simplicity and plain style as a sign of the rejection of ornament and excess. This embracing of simplicity was intimately tied up with new ways of viewing scripture, the written word as receptacle of spiritual truth, a simple, accessible and transparent believer. As Calvin, the most translated of Reformation theologians in England states, there should be one true unity of faith so the simplicity of the gospel go before it and guide it. Simplicity as an aesthetic is marked by the meeting of inner and outer form, a stripping away of anything excessive so that what is inside is apparent on the outside. Indeed the literal meaning of simple is single fold, sem means one and is drawn from the Latin simplex. So the simple form is singular, hence the association of simplicity with honesty. Simple form is not double, not duplicitous and it gains its meaning from its opposition to complexity. Simplicity promises transparency, it is truthful, accessible and therefore to some degree democratic, anybody can access it. Adherence to simplicity at the Reformation was expressed most dramatically in iconoclasm, the rejection of images. Such iconoclasm privileged God given reason and belief and equated it with lack of form and enabled an understanding of scripture as God breathed to the degree that it enables an unhindered and unmediated reception of the divine. Outward forms were dismissed as obstructions. This refusal of icons, images and ornament took the form of plain style but iconoclasm in the very act of breaking idols created its own idol. If we take an idol to be an object that is given excessive devotion then iconoclasm produced the idol of simplicity, an aesthetic that infuses any simple thing with divine character. One result of the priority of simplicity was the rejection of ornate ritual, simplicity's opposite. Potosintism has long been suspicious of ritual precisely because of its relation to the outward and to ornament, the outward that may be empty repetition or excessive display as it's seen. However the simple in practice affects the opposite, preference for the simple merely filters outward form into the specific form of the plain or minimal. My own work to date is focused on the context of English national identity and I argue that the characteristics valued in English identity are due to its self designated status. Until at least the late 19th century as the preeminent Protestant nation in opposition to its Catholic neighbors. Even as early as the 17th century this identity was formulated in terms of habitual values as well as explicit doctrinal theological values. Hence the well-known distinction between the round heads and the cavaliers in the 17th century was visible, simple and plain style versus ornamental and elaborate. This is the explicit tension at play through to the late 19th century. Plain and simple are good whereas the elaborate and ornament are bad. We can see these aesthetic values played out in various realms. Verbal intricacy is often associated with the deceit or manipulation whereas plain speaking is good and honest. Ostentatious display of wealth is bad whereas the minimalist aesthetic even if it is expensive to maintain is morally good. The removal of outward form is of course a myth. Simplicity as an aesthetic is always culturally specific and it is always substantial. It is not just a lack. My wider work has explored the differences for example between English and American forms of simplicity where English simplicity signifies the domestic, enclosed and cultivated as epitomised in the garden landscape. American simplicity influenced by the frontier wilderness is constructed often in terms of openness and expansiveness. Renaissance biblical aesthetic set in motion the aesthetic preference for simplicity which in turn led to a whole swath of habitual values, fundamental values that the externalising of emotion is bad, internalising is good, excessive clothing is bad and simplicity is morally better. Taste for the simple reveals discernment whereas taste for the elaborate reveals lack of discrimination. Adherence to simplicity as inherently valuable leads to cultural and subcultural prejudice. Those who don't value simple aesthetics are flawed in their judging abilities, the logic goes. Understanding the continuing power of simplicity is imperative I'd argue and the example I want to consider is that of Islamophobia. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in his book Anti-Semite and Jew an analysis of racial and religious prejudice. He wrote that the more one is absorbed in fighting evil the less one is tempted to place the good in question. I want to integrate the good of the logic of simplicity in relation to Showtime's espionage thriller Homeland. So here's an image from the credits to give you a sense of it. To illustrate how attention to Protestant aesthetics of simplicity in current national identities reveals the mechanisms of prejudice and as a result makes apparent the illogicality and emptiness of such prejudices. Critical work on the series has often criticised it for its crude depiction of terrorism that conflates Islam, the Middle East and terrorism. That the white even supremely white as a ginger terrorist suspect Brody is ultimately exonerated leads for example Jason Middle to argue that the series solidifies the dominant notion that terrorists are Arab foreigners not white marines. Others on the other hand have identified ways in which the series does in complex ways contest this conflation of Islam and terrorism. But my interest is in exploring not just how the series consciously represents Islam, but the ways in which the logic of simple aesthetics works in the depiction of American and foreign identities. Whilst criticism to date concentrates on conscious expressions of Islamic and American identity, my focus is on how prejudice travels in aesthetic form in the series. The mechanisms of prejudice are revealed to be at work in the hidden logics of aesthetic responses not only of the characters in the series, but also in us its viewers. The first series of homeland demonstrates how prejudice is located in the habit and materiality of American Protestant heritage rather than in philosophical or theological opposition. The Marine Nicholas Brody has returned from eight years in Iraq having been captured by Al Qaeda. Brody returns as a national hero to eventually run for Congress. But the first series focuses on the efforts of CIA officer Carrie Matheson to find out whether Brody has been converted to terrorism. First aid aired in 2011, the series is obviously invested in national identity in what it means to be an American and how being American depends on good state security. The opening titles, Site 911 as an explicit reference with an image of Barack Obama and a clip from his speech announcing the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011 in which he asserts the nation's response to terror. We must and we will remain vigilant at home and abroad, invoking a sense of the foreign and domestic enemy. Characters talk about America and the war on terror as an almost exclusively vital concern to the degree that it psychologically consumes the CIA site CIA officer Carrie. At the end of the episode when Carrie has been kicked out of the CIA she continues working to try to foil a suspected terrorist attack. She shouts, it will always be my job, don't you get that? The series is about homeland security and Brody's return from Iraq is the story of the American hero. When Carrie voices her suspicions that Brody has been converted to terrorism it is the threat to the national narrative of the American hero that makes those around her more cautious. Brody has converted to Islam and it is in the different characters' responses to his conversion that in which viewer prejudice against Islam are played out and where unconscious and conscious linking of Islam and terrorism are I think played on by the directors. The assumption is that to be an American is not to be a Muslim. As critics have noted the representation of Brody's Islamic faith seems to be set up deliberately in ways that draws out from even the most liberal of viewers a suspicion that conversion to Islam is a sign of terrorism. Scenes push the viewer to conflate Islam and terrorism in a way that reflects popular media discourse and I think works hard to unearth the smallest of prejudices against Islam as a foreign and threatening religion. In one scene for example, so it's how the scene plays out the scene cuts between Brody's prayer in his garage, his Islamic prayer his recitation of Allah Hu Akbar carried over through the visual cut to images of men travelling in the back of an open truck in a Middle Eastern landscape with an automatic rifle clearly visible. The continuation of the soundscape of Islamic prayer to the visual of terrorism works to push these two concepts together so that is the signifier of Brody's prayer that is linked to the signified of terrorist activity. For individual episodes play with the link between Islam and terrorism the negative assumptions performed about Islam are countered by Carrie and Dana Brody's daughter who are quite accepting of Brody's conversion reading it as a matter of personal preference. Carrie seems largely uninterested as Brody explains the comfort he gains from his faith. In the homely space of the porch, this is quite hard to see but Dana finds him in the garage but then they have the chat in the lovely homely porch. Dana asks why Brody has remained secretive about his conversion and Brody claims he didn't want to scare the family. Dana's sarcastic reply, it's a good thing you didn't shoot a deer or beat the crap out of Mike then places Islamic faith as a rather weak threat in relation to Brody's violent and yet understandably passionate and implicitly American attack on his friend. But this is to concentrate on consciously identified and rebuffed prejudice against Islam. My own understanding of national identities as located in material habitual everyday activity is apparent in homeland because it portrays a clash of habitual norms not the clash of doctrine or beliefs. This can be illustrated in the two forms of prayer shown in series one and the aesthetic characterisations attached to each form of prayer and what these forms communicate. In the episode in which we find that Brody has converted to Islam we watch Carrie lead her surveillance team and the character Max follows Brody to a DIY store. Brody has just punched a journalist in his garden and run off to find himself in a local mall. We view Brody under surveillance through Max's eyes and perspective and you can see this through the picture on the left hand side with the foregrounds blurred as though it's kind of human viewing the scene rather than a camera which wouldn't have the blurring. The camera watches Brody walking up and down the aisles in the DIY store with Max speaking to Carrie on his walkie-talkie saying he's looking at everything, screws, electrical wiring. The mention of electrical wiring alongside the visual of Brody picking up an electrical switch pushes the viewer to consider the slippage of the term DIY from domestic to terrorist purposes as in DIY bomb. The surveillance set up leads to the suspicion that Brody may be shopping for explosives. In the end we find he has bought a bowl and a mat for praying but this DIY store scene sets up these prayer objects that they are preemptively overlaid with signifiers of terrorism. The necessity of buying a bowl for the ritual cleansing of hands and a rug on which to pray accentuates the ritual and external character Islamic prayer. In aesthetic terms Brody's Islamic praying is elaborately ritualised in various ways through the objects needed and through its performance in a specific place that signifies a duplicitous complexity. Brody prays in the garage, an other kind of place, non-domestic and homely. The prayer's spatial discrepancy is also demonstrated through its ritualised physicality which includes repetitive elements. Brody rarely moves beyond the first few lines of prayer repeating only alahu akba accentuating repetition. Bodily movement is emphasised and the camera lingers on the position of Brody's hands when he prays and the space needed to pray in a very large garage. The garage space is invisible to surveillance and separate from the home and aligns its distance from intimacy and the home. In contrast Protestant prayer is represented in obviously simple terms. Brody finds his son Chris praying at the bedside in these superlatively domestic and intimate of settings father and son kneel side by side. At dinner time in the bottom right hand side Grace is spontaneous, shared in family space and utterly devoid of extraneous objects or space. The contrast between the two kinds of prayer is made most apparent in the final episode of the series which moves more directly between Islamic and Protestant prayer. In this final episode Brody and his family so this is I've tried to capture most of their scene in this final episode Brody and his family sit down to a meal and Brody volunteers to say Grace. This Grace is part of family dinner emphasising lack of ritual. The camera lingers on the family holding hands as you can see in these clips rather awkwardly above the table there are clasping and clasping of hands fingers fluttering and moving draws the gaze of the viewer in a way that emphasises the lack of extraneous objects for praying. That the family don't hold hands in the Grace said in episode 2 suggests its inclusion here is purposeful. To the prayer stripped to its simple essentials to bear hands and bare words a prayer of connection in which bare hands touch other bare hands inner and outer form seemingly correspond as the stumbling over words is a sign of authenticity it is truthful, accessible and seemingly democratic. The action moves to other scenes elsewhere and other characters. When we next see Brody he is in his garage and we hear an overlay of a terrorist leader speaking about prayer. The images accentuate the size and the coldness of the garage in these images if you can see them. Dana after initial shock demonstrates an accepting attitude to Islam when she walks in on him in this scene and she asks why do you wash your hands and feet for example these questions enable an explanation of Islamic ritual by Brody rendering the prayer and rituals more understandable and logical and importantly metaphorical they symbolise purity he explains. On a conceptual level then the audience is pushed towards identifying with Dana and intelligently accepting Islam as a non-threatening religion separated from terrorist activity yet the aesthetic force of Brody's prayer remains Brody's Islamic prayer remains excessive, outward, ritualised and foreign where the family prayer is minimal, interior and spontaneous. His Islamic prayer's threatening foreignness remains its distance from normality is emphasised by its separation from the home and homeliness in its sighting in the garage the family grace remains simple, inward, American. Just to move to the conclusion what this reading of home now reveals is the ways in which the aesthetic of simplicity has become the measure of true belief at the expense of rational engagement is claimed to be formless is believed as are its connotations of honesty, revelation and transparency simplicity is embracing as an identifier of American identity that communicates positive characteristics but has a false sign pointing to a lack that can't exist it has to ultimately fail in its full complexity the series portrays a complex world in which prejudices and assumptions about appearances are continually played with and questioned Islamic and American values are transported instead in the aesthetic realm not in intelligent engagement with theological content or explicit values. As a concluding reflection then I would like to argue that the privileging of simplicity in national identities is a problem not because it's without value but because I think Protestant heritage nations have overvalued simplicity they've been drawn in by its great promises that the great promises simplicity makes in its truth claims and even its gesture towards democratic inclusion true things should be simple and there's nothing better than the simple truth so the saying goes simple truth means you get what you see you have access to all the facts this is a principle upon which democracy is based we vote for people who show integrity through the aesthetics of simplicity and who live a simple life who value the simple truth the danger of aesthetic of the aesthetic of simplicity is not then that it is potentially deceptive but it is always deceptive simplicity is always put on it always takes effort and is no guarantee of any value or characteristic picture for example the politician Nigel Farage holding his pint of beer and Donald Trump in his almost vulgar candor calling James Corney a netjob and in more positive terms saying of the Pope he is something he's really good part of their success is due to the fact that they signify a specifically culturally recognisable form of simplicity for both men this simplicity manifests itself in the aesthetic of the brusque honesty of the common man that persists in the face of factual lies or dishonesty