American Religious History Research Articles

Christopher Grasso, Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War

American Religion 2, no. 1 (Fall 2020), pp. 189–191 Copyright © 2020, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.2.1.19 Book Review Christopher Grasso, Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018) Nathan G. Alexander Fort Erie, Canada In recent years, there has been much new scholarship on the history of atheists and unbelievers. Christopher Grasso’s Skepticism and American Faith is part of this trend, but, as he says, “seasoning the narrative of American religious history with the stories of a few vocal freethinkers is not enough” to understand fully the place of skepticism within early America (7). Instead, Grasso tells a holistic story about the ways in which religion and skepticism were intimately linked during this period. For Grasso, doubt and skepticism are not just an interesting but ultimately unimportant tangent to the main story of religion in the period; they are, rather, fundamental. Moving chronologically, Grasso uses individual case studies to develop his argument. These include freethinkers like Elihu Palmer, Abner Kneeland, and Ernestine Rose who openly avowed their skepticism and their hostility to Christianity. But to me the key figures in Grasso’s argument are those skeptics who ultimately ended up embracing some form of Christianity. Following periods of skepticism, these figures became preachers, authored books refuting skeptics, or founded new religious movements. Even someone like Robert Dale Owen, who was an outspoken skeptic for much of his life, became a Spiritualist toward the end. Grasso shows that the individuals’ periods of doubt, even if they American Religion 2:1 190 later returned to Christianity, were formative to their future religious views and shaped the way they continued to relate to the “infidels” of their times. What is striking is how fluid religious identities were in this period. An extreme case is Orestes Brownson, who moved from Calvinism as a child, to Universalism, to an even more radical skepticism, to Transcendentalism, and finally to Catholicism, with his politics transforming in step with his changing religious identities. While most people did not change religions as often as Brownson, religious identity was not static at this time. Individuals tried out various denominations of Christianity and shades of skepticism over the course of their lives. It is not right, therefore, to talk about a sharp religious vs. secular binary. In fact, as Grasso shows, there was blurriness between and within these categories of “religious” and “secular.” For Grasso, it is the wrong question to focus on the absolute numbers of outspoken skeptics in this time as a way to understand their influence. Skepticism had important effects even if they were not straightforward. As he writes, “Religious skepticism did not secularize America, as the free inquirers of the 1830s had hoped, or produce armies of militant atheists, as some Christians had feared. But to rest with that conclusion is to miss the more complicated effects that skepticism did have – effects best seen in the stories of individual lives and in the complex connections of ideas to social and political practices” (356). One example of this is the early religious skepticism of John Bayley, a journeyman printer from England, which was informed by what he saw as church hypocrisy toward wealth inequality. As he grew older, he converted to Methodism, inspired by the piety observed among slaves in Virginia, and his politics also grew more conservative. Previously an advocate for the working classes, Bayley came to believe their poverty was the result of their own moral failings rather than the capitalist system they inhabited. The link between religion and changing social, political, and economic contexts is thus one of the central tensions explored by the book. Another focus is how religious identity is (or is not) connected with a sense of national identity: a key debate throughout the period was whether a new nation could be united by religion and, if so, what kind. Indeed, Grasso’s portrayal of this debate historicizes the concept of “religion” itself by showing that its definition was constructed and contested in this period. If religion was indeed necessary to act as a social glue, skeptics were a dangerous and despised minority. Sometimes...

The psychic life of consumer power: Judith Butler, Ernest Dichter, the American marketing reception of Freud, and the rituals of consuming religion

First, a close reading of Judith Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power underscores the ways in which Butler’s account of power liquidates issues of political economy and problematically ontologizes Freudianism as a kind of first philosophy of the subject. Second, drawing largely from secondary sources, the religious studies reader is introduced to the life and work of Ernest Dicther, the father of motivational research, an influential American mid-twentieth century psychoanalytic school of marketing that Freudianized marketing discourse and transformed it into the present day. Third, drawing from primary sources in Dichter’s published archive, a comparative reading of Butler and Dichter reveals strong points of confluence around the psychology and performativity of (consumer) ritual, concomitantly highlighting scholars’ hidden participation in the American religious history Kathryn Lofton figures according to the terms of ‘consuming religion’.

Skepticism and Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War by Christopher Grasso

Reviewed by: Skepticism and Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War by Christopher Grasso Tara Strauch (bio) Skepticism and Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War. By Christopher Grasso. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 664. $34.95 cloth; $34.95 ebook) American religious history has changed drastically over the past one hundred years. Religious historians moved from the confessional histories of the nineteenth century towards examining religious groups as cultural entities. At times over the past two decades, scholars congratulated themselves on these changes in form and function. Perhaps that is why the premise behind Christopher Grasso's book was so striking to me. Grasso puts religious skepticism at the center of his study and in doing so reminds religious historians that belief is only one piece of the story. Rather than emphasizing belief, this book argues that antebellum Americans were far more open to religious skepticism, doubt, and freethinking than we often assume. And that doubt, in particular, drove early American intellectual history until the Civil War when the sacralization of North and South left no room for the skeptic in American public life. Grasso starts his investigation in the heady, politically charged world of revolutionary America where skepticism was often a political liability and a moral failing. Part one examines how the American Revolution enabled and encouraged skepticism while it also restricted skeptics from forming organized associations such as the Deistical societies that might give skepticism cultural and political legitimacy. Grasso places the "deist hero" Ethan Allen in conversation with the "deist monster" William Beadle and the faith of Jarena Lee with the skepticism of Elihu Palmer. Skepticism existed in eighteenth-century America but it could not flourish because of the institutional obstacles—like legal restrictions and religious patriotism—of the new nation. Part two, Enlightenments, considers the intersection of belief, economics, and morality by focusing particularly on Thomas Cooper's skepticism and economic support of slavery. Grasso contrasts Cooper's skepticism with the faith of Ezra Stiles Ely and David Nelson who [End Page 339] together founded Marion College in Missouri on the principles of "enlightened Christian moral economy" (p. 228). When the college failed, these two men came to see skepticism, and slavery, as the main cause. Concluding this section of the book, Grasso compares Nelson and Ely's splintered visions for the nation with the way in which anti-slavery brought New England Unitarians and skeptics back together. Tracing the arguments of George Bethune English, Theodore Parker, and Richard Hildreth among others, Grasso argues that this common moral cause pushed the threat of deism and skepticism away from that region for a time. Part three follows attempts to change American behaviors through radical social and spiritual reformations between 1820 and 1850. "Radical Reformers" like Frances Wright, Robert Dale Owen, and William Alcott emphasized communal living, diet, and purposeful living as keys to social change while others, like Orestes Brownson, moved from skepticism to faith and found religious ways of working for earthly reform. These reformers, however, conflicted with socially conservative Christians who argued, in various ways, that worldly success and economic security provided scant comfort in the next life. Part four, Sacred Causes, considers how "civil religious theology" or "public theology" shaped Americans' opinions about slavery, Christianity, and the Civil War. Smaller than the previous sections of the book these two chapters demonstrate how the South, or at least South Carolina, melded Christianity and pro-slavery thought to the exclusion of skepticism. In the North, meanwhile, individuals could work in unison against slavery while believing in different religions—some battling slavery in the name of God while others fought for the "promise of Freedom and Equality" (p. 395). This book is a masterpiece; it tells a big story through detailed and nuanced historical research. Skepticism and Faith provides a grand narrative of American history through the Civil War that rivals popular narratives of American progress and toleration. Instead, Grasso offers doubt and skepticism as the engine behind American [End Page 340] development. This is not a popular history book, however, as its dense prose weaves together intellectual biographies of many American thinkers. In any given chapter, Grasso brings three or four...

Church in the Wild: Evangelicals in Antebellum America by Brett Malcolm Grainger

Reviewed by: Church in the Wild: Evangelicals in Antebellum America by Brett Malcolm Grainger Michael J. Altman (bio) Church in the Wild: Evangelicals in Antebellum America. By Brett Malcolm Grainger. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2019. Pp. 280. Cloth, $45.00.) In her groundbreaking book A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (2007), Catherine Albanese contends that three major forms of religiosity worked their way through American religious history: evangelical religion, liturgical religion, and metaphysical religion. She dedicates her book to this third stream, arguing that it had hitherto been underappreciated by historians. She spends the rest of the book defining and outlining the history of metaphysical religion. Had Brett Grainger pushed Albanese’s argument further in his book, he would have collapsed the distinction she made between evangelical and metaphysical religion in a pathbreaking new way. In Church in the Wild, Grainger argues convincingly that antebellum evangelicals, as he defines them, participated in a “nature spirituality” that has yet to be fully appreciated by historians. He also argues that historians have missed this participation by anachronistically applying twentieth-century distinctions between “liberal” and “conservative” Protestants back onto the antebellum period. [End Page 409] Across the book’s five chapters, Grainger describes how evangelicals sacralized local places and landscapes, engaged in contemplative practice in nature, practiced and promoted hydrotherapy, and reinterpreted metaphysical notions of electricity and ether. Grainger structures the book according to “the spiritual life as evangelicals understood it, a path wending from conversion or justification by faith (the new birth) to the pursuit of holiness or sanctification (the new life), and finally to the coming kingdom of heaven and the world to come (the new earth)” (14). In chapter 1, Grainger argues that antebellum evangelical new births happened in the woods. He describes outdoor worship, riverbank baptisms, the hush arbors of slave Christianity, and sacred memorialization of the landscape as evidence for the importance of nature in evangelical revivalism. While he could have spent more time and space considering it, the political aspect of the outdoors in revivalist practice is of particular interest throughout the chapter. Grainger reveals how real dissenters had church outside: “Identifying their often-unruly gatherings with auspicious biblical models, evangelicals turned on its head the traditional Protestant preference for built worship space. Vital piety was more likely to be found in God’s own temple than in a house made with human hands” (26–27). The claims that “vital piety” happened in the woods functioned as authorizing claims for revivalist religion. Similarly, African-descended slaves worshiped in the outdoor hush arbors to escape white surveillance and practice an alternative to the slaveholding religion of white-led churches. In both cases, evangelicals claimed that vital religion happened outside church buildings. The middle chapters of the book describe how nature functioned in evangelical practice. In chapters 2 and 3, Grainger convincingly argues that contemplation on nature was central to antebellum evangelical devotional practice. Evangelicals brought an analogical method to the contemplation of nature. “Every creature was a letter encoded with multiple meanings,” he writes, “from the literal to the moral and finally to the spiritual, which always revealed some aspect of God’s plan of salvation” (68). Contemplation progressed from external perception to internal insights about the nature of Christ. Here, again, the politics of natural contemplation are of interest. Grainger points out that women, children, and African Americans engaged in the extension of nature contemplation. Evangelicals considered women less logical and thus less able to interpret and teach the Bible, but they described women “as more naturally gifted interpreters of God’s first book” (92). Using spirituals and memoirs from black preachers, Grainger shows how African Americans built their own forms of nature contemplation as they adapted Christianity for their own purposes. [End Page 410] Along with contemplation, antebellum evangelicals also turned to nature for its healing powers. Grainger shows in chapter 4 how evangelicals found a powerful, vital, and providential source of curative power in natural springs and hydrotherapy. At this point, the line between metaphysical and evangelical begins to show serious cracks. The best example is Grainger’s description of Catharine Beecher, a Congregationalist who extolled the...

Escaped Nuns: True Womanhood and the Campaign Against Convents in Antebellum America by Cassandra L. Yacovazzi

Reviewed by: Escaped Nuns: True Womanhood and the Campaign Against Convents in Antebellum America by Cassandra L. Yacovazzi Emily Suzanne Clark (bio) Cassandra L. Yacovazzi, Escaped Nuns: True Womanhood and the Campaign Against Convents in Antebellum America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 232 pages. In Escaped Nuns: True Womanhood and the Campaign Against Convents in Antebellum America, historian Cassandra Yacovazzi takes the 1836 bestseller Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal and tells a story that spans from the antebellum period to the twenty-first century. Building on the work of Tracy Fessenden, Jenny Franchot, Nancy Lusignan Schultz, and others, Yacovazzi explores the religious, political, social, cultural, and at times physical, attacks against convents in the antebellum period. "The image of the veiled nun appeared as the inversion of the true woman," she argues early in the book, and furthermore, that image was "needed to sustain the nation" (xxii). The antebellum period was a time of change, from immigration and nativism to gender roles and family structures to elation and anxiety about the westward expansion of the republic. It was important for the nation to have pious, submissive, pure American women to become wives and mothers. Nuns existed outside this mold and thus outside what it meant to be a true woman. A short introduction reviews anti-Catholicism in America and the book's central questions. The first chapter introduces Awful Disclosures, Maria Monk herself, the Protestant ministers who took advantage of her, and the early reception of the book. A key point of the book is presented here: "What one journal referred to as 'Maria Monkism' mattered more than Maria Monk" (25). The following chapters unpack the burning of the Mount [End Page 163] Benedict convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts, consider the relationship between anti-slavery and anti-convent novels, examine how the convent and its demonized specter shaped discourse on public schools, place anti-convent writings alongside increasing concerns about the antebellum city's hidden perils, compare how anxiety of female sexual deviance worked in anti-Catholicism and anti-Mormonism, and offer a close reading of the Massachusetts Nunnery Committee and the Know Nothing Party. A twenty-page epilogue includes a short history of how women religious have been viewed and imagined from the Civil War to the 2008 film Doubt. Sadly, as the epilogue and the whole book show, stereotypes of the nun loom large in American cultural history. The book makes a crucial historiographical intervention to American history. As Yacovazzi explains in the epilogue, the broader American public does not understand women religious. They rarely grace our popular culture (and when they do, it is often problematic) and historians typically overlook them in textbooks and even works on American religious history. If "Catholics are surprisingly absent from [tellings of] U.S. history," as Robert Orsi claims, then even more absent are the stories and experiences of women religious.1 Escaped Nuns works hard to help remedy this. In this process, Yacovazzi shows the reader how the campaign against nuns helps illuminate a number of themes and events in American history. Through her examination of "Maria Monkism" and the way American Protestants cast Catholic nuns as a dangerous other, Yacovazzi illustrates the damage wrought by the campaign against convents in the antebellum period and even today. Clocking in at 160 pages before notes, Escaped Nuns could have been expanded. Yacovazzi did extensive research on the reception of anti-convent writings, and offering some background about these periodicals, especially in terms of reach and readership, could have been useful for readers. Including American Catholicism's acceptance and support of slavery could have helped contextualize the chapter on anti-slavery campaigns. Engaging more with works on religious intolerance in America, beyond anti-Catholicism, might have sharpened some of Yacovazzi's analysis of "othering." However, the book's length is one of its strengths. Each chapter is an ideal size for the undergraduate classroom, and each chapter demonstrates how "Maria Monkism" rendered Awful Disclosures more powerful than any ordinary book. Succinctness and clarity are difficult to achieve and adding more context could have disrupted the book's efficient construction. [End Page 164] Escaped Nuns is a necessary book...

Reconfiguring the Boundaries of American Religious Studies

American Religion 2, no. 1 (Fall 2020), pp. 10–13 Copyright © 2020, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.2.1.03 Reconfiguring the Boundaries of American Religious Studies Abtsam Saleh Harvard University, Cambridge, USA Why is American Islam is so Rarely Framed as an “American Religion” in the Field of Religious Studies? Despite existing in America long before the establishment of the United States, Muslims have been largely left out of discussions on American religion within the field of religious studies. In order to answer the question of why, one has to ask what scholars of religious studies have understood “American religion” to be. According to most surveys of American religious history, the term has been used to denote the history of Christianity in America, white Protestantism more specifically, some dating the origins of American religion back to the Protestant Reformation.1 Narratives surrounding American religion were constructed to center Protestantism and the ways it has dominated public religious life in the United States, reified by legal and political actors.2 Considerations of what fell under the category of American religion were largely based on proximity to mainline Protestant churches, casting all other denominations and/or religions outside of the category. Over time, however, 1 For more recent work on this topic see John Modern, “Marshall McLuhan, Playful Prophet” in “Forum: The Religious Situation, 1968 (Part 2),” Religion and American Culture 29, no. 2 (2019): 153–162. 2 See Marie A. Failinger, “Islam in the Mind of American Courts: 1800 to 1960,” Boston College Journal of Law and Social Justice 32, no.1 (2012): 1–29. Abtsam Saleh 11 historians of American religion have begun to expand on this narrow definition. R. Laurence Moore’s Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans,3 although working with this mainline definition of American religion, expands on the category by examining its relationship with denominations and/or religions deemed as religious outsiders on the basis of dissenting from mainline Protestantism. Moore concludes that this categorization based on consensus-dissent is inadequate in expressing the plurality of American religious life in-so-much as it continues to center mainline Christianity as the religion of the US as a nation. In the more recent “The Study of American Religions: Critical Reflections on a Specialization,” Finbarr Curtis critically examines the category of American religion as a specialization within the discipline of religious studies, including its history of Protestant bias. Curtis highlights how despite attempts at expanding American religion to include narratives of underrepresented religious groups, these inclusions remain peripheral despite being recognized.4 This precise centering of Protestantism as the American religion and the locating of those not in proximity to it in its periphery is a reason why American Islam is so rarely framed as an “American religion” in the field of religious studies. Narratives of American religious history place American Islam in the periphery, dismissing its influence on American culture and American culture ’s influence on it. American religionists reify this categorization both in their scholarship and institutionally when American Islam is positioned as peripheral to the construction of the American nation and religion. Can Islam be “American religion”? If we move away from an understanding of American religion that centers white Protestantism and expand the category to mean religions who have both shaped and been shaped by this nation, whose understandings are put in conversation with the legal, social, political, economic, and cultural life of the United States, then Islam is certainly an American religion. American Muslims are part of the patchwork of American social-religious life, preceding the formation of the United States. Enslaved African Muslims were brought to the Americas centuries prior to the American Revolution, bringing with them their religious traditions, many maintaining them in conversation with their new surroundings, and some preserving them over generations.5 Over centuries, Islam lived and grew within 3 R. Laurence Moore, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 4 Finbarr Curtis, “The Study of American Religions: Critical Reflections on a Specialization ,” Religion 42, no. 3 (2012): 365. 5 See Sylviane A. Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas, (New York: New...

Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War by Christopher Grasso

Reviewed by: Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War by Christopher Grasso Douglas L. Winiarski (bio) Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War christopher grasso Oxford University Press, 2018 649 pp. Historian Christopher Grasso has a problem: the “problem of skepticism and faith” (4). His expansive new book on religion in America from the Revolution to the Civil War takes its place among a welter of contending academic studies that characterize the period as one of either evangelical ascendancy or secular insurgency. But for Grasso, it is the “entanglement” (7) of the two that mattered most—and that would, in time, come to define the sprawling religious culture of the new United States. Of the two eponymous categories, skepticism initially seems to dominate. Grasso begins with the assertion that his study will put “skepticism back into the story of American religious history” (7). Yet this is no mere reclamation project. In Grasso’s assured prose, skepticism and faith become much more than a “contest of opposing ideas” (4). He envisions them anchoring the ends of continuum across which people moved throughout their lives. Grasso is especially attuned to the specific moments in which these terms were invoked and mobilized in particular economic, political, or social contexts—the “alchemy of real life” (195). Drawing on the extensive literature of lived religion—and “lived irreligion, too” (4), as the author quips in his introduction—Skepticism and Faith seeks to move “beyond the confines of traditional intellectual history” and into the “daily practices” (4) of an eclectic cast of characters who engaged with and expressed indifference toward traditional forms of Protestantism. Grasso organizes the book into four loosely chronological parts. “Revolutions, 1775–1815,” examines the “relationship of religion and government” and the “ways that religion could be practiced in a ‘free’ environment” (20). Part 2, “Enlightenments, 1790–1840,” presents a broad array of clergymen and freethinkers who grappled with new intellectual and philosophical trends and vigorously debated what it meant to live in an “enlightened and Christian” nation. Social reformers take center stage in part 3, “Reforms, 1820–1850,” in which Grasso shows how the twin poles of skepticism and faith shaped Americans’ experiences of emergent capitalism and its attendant social ills. The final two chapters, in a part titled [End Page 273] “Sacred Causes, 1830–1865,” trace the diverse strategies through which the skeptical and faithful alike “sanctified” (394) sectional politics during the decades leading up to the American Civil War. Seen from one angle, Skepticism and Faith is an ambitious cultural history written on a vast scale. Grasso tackles large historiographical issues ranging from citizenship and social reform to slavery and western expansion. He draws on a staggering number of newspapers; books, tracts, pamphlets, and essays; autobiographies and novels; letters, journals, and other archival texts. Yet the book remains an intimate portrait of antebellum religious life, carefully organized around prosopographical chapters featuring both notable and obscure individuals. In early chapters recovering the intellectual worlds of deists and other skeptics, Grasso offers tantalizing evidence of freethinking African Americans whose experiences of enslavement led them to reject all forms of religion; and he plumbs the troubled mind of Connecticut lawyer William Beadle, whose dabbling in deist literature led to murder and suicide—and partly inspired Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland. Other chapters track the sinuous religious lives of prominent figures, including novelist and Catholic convert Orestes Brownson, abolitionist Jarena Lee, biblical numerologist William Miller, Methodist itinerant Jeremiah Minter, and social reformers Frances Wright and Robert Dale Owen. Grasso also works with a fascinating cast of little-known but not-quite-ordinary men and women, such as Richard Hildreth, a bookish Utilitarian philosopher; Ernestine Rose, whose incendiary assault on the fundamentals of the Christian faith and passionate defense of women’s rights sparked a riot at the 1853 Hartford Bible Convention; and a host of others who read Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason and the Bible, attended philosophical lectures and revival meetings, joined churches and utopian communities, and, above all, preached, discussed, debated, and published their endlessly shifting views on natural philosophy and revealed religion. Grasso’s braided biographies brim with irony, strange twists and...

Antimodernism and Orthodox Judaism's Heretical Imperative: An American Religious Counterpoint

AbstractThis article argues that the case of religious authority within Orthodox Judaism is an important counterexample to the broader and understudied developments in American religion during the final decades of the twentieth century. Using an array of untapped primary sources and drawing on themes addressed by scholars of American religious history and modern Jewish history, this article demonstrates how Orthodox Jewish elites used “approximational heresies” to police their faith community. In so doing, Orthodox leaders furnished “indicators” of apostasy that were unknown in previous epochs and served to stand in for traditional types that proved otherwise insufficient to counteract new trends in modern life and culture. Orthodox Jewish “antimodernism” was animated by a need to demonstrate what was “in” and what was “out” of bounds as well as by the emergence of a triumphalism that was unique among American faiths. Likewise, the rank-and-file abided because they either agreed with these measures or feared becoming “outsiders.” This outlook contrasts with the attitudes of other religious groups—on the “left” and the “right”—that absorbed a spirit of “inclusiveness” and, therefore, eschewed heresy hunting and the boldness evinced by Orthodox elites during this period. The article concludes that the pervasiveness of this counterculture among the Orthodox Jewish community was so powerful that it, counterintuitively, introduced the strategies of the antimodernists to the American-acculturated, so-called Modern Orthodox community.

Editorial

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...

“A Rare Human Document”: LoBagola’s African American Humbug Religion

In this essay I present the case of Baltimore native Joseph Howard Lee, whose self-presentation in the 1920s and 1930s as the West African Jew Bata Kindai Amgoza ibn LoBagola, captured the attention of white American consumers of his lectures and writings that purported to offer insight into African religions, culture, and history. I propose that viewing his career not only as one of imposture, but also as involving religious humbug, brings his performative critique of white Christian America to the fore. Locating such religious humbug within the bounds of the study of religion in America challenges scholars to engage African American religious history in more complex ways than the conventional deployment of Black religion as moral prod to the conscience of white America.

Missionaries to the Mormons: NOW’s ERA Missionary Project

Research Article| October 01 2019 Missionaries to the Mormons: NOW’s ERA Missionary Project William P. Connors William P. Connors WILLIAM P. CONNORS recently completed a master of theological studies degree in American religious history at Harvard Divinity School. He earned a BA with honors in religious studies and economics from Yale University and an MA in American history from Brigham Young University with graduate minors in religion, the thesis for which he earned the MHA William Grover and Winifred Foster Reese Award for Best Dissertation or Thesis. He is a consultant in the nonprofit sector. The author wishes to acknowledge and thank David F. Holland and Erik Nordbye, Harvard Divinity School, and the author’s colleagues in the workshopping of this paper at Harvard Divinity School and at the 2018 Mormon Studies Publication Workshop for their insights and contributions to the development of this article. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Mormon History (2019) 45 (4): 105–132. https://doi.org/10.5406/jmormhist.45.4.0105 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation William P. Connors; Missionaries to the Mormons: NOW’s ERA Missionary Project. Journal of Mormon History 1 October 2019; 45 (4): 105–132. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jmormhist.45.4.0105 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of Mormon History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The business turn in American religious history. Edited by Amanda Porterfield, Darren E. Grem and John Corrigan. Pp. xxii + 239 incl. 1 table. Oxford–New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. £22.99 (paper). 978 0 19 028020 8

The business turn in American religious history. Edited by Amanda Porterfield, Darren E. Grem and John Corrigan. Pp. xxii + 239 incl. 1 table. Oxford–New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. £22.99 (paper). 978 0 19 028020 8

“That’s Not How the Story Ends:” Vincent Harding’s Liberating Vision of African American Religious History

ABSTRACTA critical reappraisal of Vincent Harding’s transformative work as a preeminent historian of the African American freedom struggle is long overdue. Examining Harding’s major works – There Is A River (1981), Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero (1996), and Hope and History (1990) – this paper focuses on Harding’s revisionist approach to US religious history by addressing three historiographical elements: radical reinterpretation of historical narrative from the perspective of the oppressed; the uses and abuses of biography in the historical representations of Dr. King in popular culture and collective memory; and articulation of a philosophy of history rooted in a theology of hope and human flourishing. This paper illustrates how Harding’s writings advance a liberating vision for history as both a discipline and discursive realm in service to social justice and human dignity.

Everything Blended

In this essay, I open a discussion on how the blending and combining of cultural elements are understood and engaged in our classrooms and research. Specifically, I do two things. First, I illustrate that combining and blending practices, while perhaps more visible in the contemporary period, are a constant in American religious history. Second, I provide a case study of Third Wave Spiritual Warfare that heeds the anthropologist Charles Stewart’s suggestion that one useful way to approach syncretism (and its synonyms) is by examining the discourses and debates that individuals and groups have over what activities and ideas are viewed as such. Overall, I argue that we need to develop a method for both teaching and examining the appropriative bricolage that makes up religious practices.

From the Book of Mormon to the Circle Seven Koran: Scriptures of American new religions

AbstractThis article examines the growing scholarship on scripture in American new religious movements, specifically on exemplary studies on African–American Islam, Mormonism, and Satanism. After reviewing the state of the scholarship, I seek to encourage additional work in this inchoate subfield at the intersection of new religious movements, American religious history, and scriptural studies by offering potential trajectories and publication venues.

“Queering” African American religious history

AbstractThis article raises questions about how scholars of African American religions and of Black Queer Studies have historically and historiographically rendered queer and transgender persons as being devoid of a religion of their choosing. It calls for research on LGBTQ+ persons in African American religious history and discusses the necessity of “queering” theories and methods in the study of African American religions. To do this, it traces a genealogy of historians of African American religious history “queering” the study of African American religions in order to analyze the state of the field and chart new directions for future study.

“Precious Lord”: Black Mother-Loss and the Roots of Modern Gospel

Thomas Dorsey’s 1932 gospel song Take My Hand, Precious Lord is one of modern gospel music’s most canonical works. Although its composition by Dorsey in the wake of his wife’s sudden death in childbirth is a widely known oral history, the cultural implications of a wider history of health care disparities in the US leading to higher rates of black maternal and infant mortality have not been seriously considered. This article studies the history of black maternal and infant mortality in Chicago during the Great Migration as it bears on the mournful sounds of the gospel blues and its gender-inflected beginnings. The history of early gospel, I argue, was profoundly influenced by black women’s sympathetic identification with the experiences of migration and mother-loss Nettie Dorsey’s death represents. While Thomas Dorsey is distinguished as “the father of gospel music,” Nettie Dorsey might be fruitfully imagined as the spectral “mother” of gospel in its mournful expressions of black women’s spiritual consciousness. As such, she stands in for an alternate history of modern gospel musicality, one helping African American religious and musical history see and hear better what Emily Lordi calls “black feminist resonance” in black musical production in the golden age of gospel.

New scholarship in religion and United States empire

AbstractThe last few decades have seen an immense expansion in the range of topics included in the field of American religion. The methodologies and overarching narratives of the field have, however, remained more static. Despite the inclusion of racialized minorities, women, and non‐Christians in American religious history, the field has still tended to endorse a liberal integrationist narrative that minimizes the distinct positions of these and other groups in American religious life. New research conducted under the rubric of “religion and U.S. empire” offers one possible way forward for the field by reorienting narratives about American religion toward the study of how colonial systems produce terms such as religion, freedom, and pluralism. This new approach not only foregrounds the stories of colonized peoples but also allows their experiences to reframe how we narrate American religious history. This article discusses the background of the study of empire in U.S. history and religious studies, provides an overview of the main theoretical interventions of works in religion and U.S. empire, and concludes with a discussion of possible future directions for research in this field.

Religion, Genealogy, and the Study of American Religions

This article serves as one of four responses to Dana Logan's 2017 JAAR article entitled, "Lean Closet: Asceticism in Postindustrial Consumer Culture." It investigates the value of genealogical method for the field of American religious history and establishes both benefits and drawbacks to its application.

Harold Morales, Latino and Muslim in America

American Religion 1, no. 2 (Spring 2020), pp. 148–150 Copyright © 2020, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.1.2.13 Book Review Harold Morales. Latino and Muslim in America (New York: Oxford University Press, March 2018) Hussein Rashid Independent Scholar, New York City, USA One of the most exciting parts of researching Muslims in America is the inherent multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary aspects of the work. One cannot engage with a simple history of Muslims in the United States. One has to contend with the history and structures of racism in the country. Questions of gender and sexuality should permeate the conversations. Perhaps most importantly, the scholar must address how one responsibly incorporates voices of Muslims themselves into the research. In some instances, inclusion may mean interviews or ethnographies. In other instances, inclusion may mean incorporating cultural artifacts produced by Muslims. Latino and Muslim in America by Harold Morales is a strong example of how to present the experiences of American Muslims in a meaningful context. The book is seven chapters, with an introduction and conclusion, and is structured chronologically. The historical framing is useful for organizing the material, and Morales makes sure that the structure does not limit him. He returns to ideas and concepts repeatedly, but views the same material through a new lens. He layers analyses, and folds back to points to start conversations anew. This approach gives him the ability to use history to tell his story, while also highlighting the limits of a purely historical narrative. Hussein Rashid 149 The introduction establishes that the book will focus on race, religion, and the media (3). The connections between race and religion are well-known in American religious history. Examining how those connections manifest amongst Latine Muslim communities is important. The addition of the media constructions of Latine and Muslim adds a depth to Morales’ analysis that is welcome. Since race and religion are discursive categories (8-9), understanding the role media has in shaping those identities is an important intervention. Morales points out that there are a diversity of Latine and Muslim identities (3), which may seem self-evident, but then highlights that the narrative flattening of those identities makes it hard to count Latine Muslims. The relationship between race and religion appears as a question of whether one can be Latine and Muslim, a theme that reemerges throughout the book. The first chapter makes history messy. Morales talks about conversion in Latine communities. His first point of departure is the Civil Rights era, when he says Latine individuals converted for similar reasons as African-Americans (16). He also points to the history of Muslims in Spain. The chapter focuses on the cultural memory of this latter point—on the “connection between Islamic Spain, memories of it, and the first Latino Muslim group in the United States, La Alianza Islámica” (17). One of the most striking things Morales points out in the chapter is the ways in which Islam in Spain is forgotten because it complicates the idea of Europe. In a similar way, the idea of why conversion happens in the US is important at the individual level, but by focusing on that issue, we miss the ways in which Latine and Muslim identities complicate the idea of the United States. As the story develops beyond La Alianza Islámica, Morales gets into the particularities of the formation of three other organizations in his second chapter. Here, he establishes the foundation for work in later chapters, including gender, online organizing, and relationships with non-Latine Muslim communities. In particular , he points out the anti-Latine sentiment among certain immigrant Muslim communities, which mirror the broader American disdain of Latine communities. In terms of use of language, Morales uses the phrase “Latina Muslimah” several times. While he does not elaborate on his choices, I thought it was a notable construction. The phrase double-genders the person in question. It seems that “Latina Muslim” would be sufficient. It raises the question for researchers as to how we should approach and deploy language, as we engage with overlapping expressions of identity that do not operate only in English. In particular, with gendered languages, sentences...