Editorial

Abstract

American Religion 1, no. 1 (Fall 2019), pp. 1–4 Copyright © 2019, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.1.1.01 Editorial Welcome to American Religion, a journal dedicated to remaking what we think about when we think about religion, to remapping common ideas of what “America” means, and to reinvigorating a sense of possibility for how the two interact with and inflect one another. Two decades into the twenty-first century, now, the center of intellectual gravity in the subfield we call “American religion” remains intimately bound with problematic legacies of US exceptionalism. Forged in a Protestant creation myth, “American religion” has historically legitimated and provided succor for Manifest Destiny, empire, and the living ideologies that undergird them. It too often relies upon narratives of diversity and religious freedom in the attempt to mitigate such problems, though doing so just as often reaffirms and vivifies this exceptionalist narrative and its legacies of violence and domination. “American religion,” in this way, is American religious history; American religious history, in turn, is Church History, broadcasting a narrow yet powerful configuration of American religious identity as normative—an authorized narrative. This exceptionalist legacy proves comforting and even lucrative for the public dissemination of “American religion,” despite the fact that twenty-first century scholars (and their publics) in increasingly hemispheric and global contexts already work beyond such myths—and indeed do so in ways that trouble the conflation of “America” and the “United States.” American Religion takes exception to these exceptionalist legacies. We maintain that the most exciting explorations of American religion operate in defiance of exceptionalist narratives and outmoded historical paradigms. By blurring, troubling, ironizing, demurring from discursive norms surrounding “religion in America,” we affirm our mission to take exception to American religious American Religion 1:1 2 exceptionalism, establishing a forum that challenges regnant assumptions regarding the subfield. The journal provides a space for authors and readers who seek to transform historical assumptions surrounding American religious studies--its methods, geographies, demographics, sources, pedagogies, languages, archives, and dispositions. We welcome as collaborators and co-conspirators all scholars, artists, readers, writers, activists, teachers, and engaged citizens who are committed to these and related intellectual pursuits. “Taking exception” should not be understood solely as a contrarian stance. By taking such exception and, in the process, resisting older legacies of church history, diversity, and religious freedom, we also agree to a great deal more: capacious understandings of the Americas and their people in US, hemispheric, and transnational contexts; a broad intellectual scope that pushes beyond the merely historical to consider questions of bodies, material culture, law, artistic expression , gender, race, sexuality, and so forth in appropriate historical contexts as well as the present tense; and a commitment to critical inquiry and theoretical engagement with these categories and the category of religion in ways that illuminate unknown or unimagined dimensions of religion and American culture. In all of these ways, American Religion strives for nothing less ambitious than to become the outstanding and field-defining venue for the academic study of religion in the Americas. Practically speaking, the journal blends older forms of scholarship with new possibilities. The core of every issue of American Religion features peer-reviewed research articles. These critical, in-depth studies create a body of knowledge based on expertise. In addition to providing a space of intellectual synthesis and exchange for established scholars, they also serve as currency for graduate students , junior and contingent scholars, and independent scholars who are making their way in American religious studies. We also recognize those scholars who may not have seen themselves as working on “American religion” or those who do not feel seen by the field. Many of our colleagues find themselves encouraging students and junior scholars engaged in what they recognize as cutting-edge research, yet wonder how such vital work might become recognized as appropriately “Americanist” for purposes of employment and tenure in religious studies if it does not cohere with or replicate the dominant strain of American religious studies. American Religion provides a forum for these authors and their research, aiming in the process to reshape the meaning of “American religion” as a subfield of academic inquiry. The articles...