¹ Noll, America's God, 192.

² Ibid., 209.

³ Ibid., 210.

⁴ See Modern, “Confessions of a Genealogist,” Religion in American History (blog), November 19, 2012, http://usreligion.blogspot.com/2013/06/modern-summer-of-love-on-secularism-in_17.html.

⁵ Tracy Fessenden, Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University, 2007), 135.

⁶ See The Religious Experience and Journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee, Giving An Account of Her Call to Preach the Gospel, rev. ed. (Philadelphia, 1849).

⁷ Reverend Edward Stevens, “Maulmain.—Journal of Rev. Mr. Stevens. Tour to Yay—Amherst,” Baptist Missionary Magazine, November 1849.

⁸ On the complexity of dissent/assent in the missionary encounter, see Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America, 99n150, 103–104.

⁹ I am reminded here of Cathy Albanese's provocative point in her presidential address to the AAR over two decades ago—the problem with historians, she suggested, and I paraphrase, is that they have not confronted their own mortality in any meaningful fashion—and so they attempt to secure an image of the past as a substitute for securing their identity in the present. See Catherine L. Albanese, “Refusing the Wild Pomegranate Seed: America, Religious History, and the Life of the Academy,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 63, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 205–229.

¹⁰ Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America, 104.

¹¹ On the viscerality of words, see Karen Fields's brilliant and lush translation of Emile Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Karen Fields (New York: The Free Press, 1995); on the virality of words, see Burroughs, William S., “By Far The Most Efficient and Precise Language We Possess is the Common Cold,” The Burroughs Academy Bulletin 6, Mayfair 3, no. 3 (March 1968): 54–56Google Scholar.

¹² Douglas, Mary, “The Effects of Modernization on Religious Change,” Daedalus 111, no. 3 (Winter 1982): 1–19Google Scholar.

¹³ John Murray Spear, The Educator: Being Suggestions, Theoretical and Practical, Designed to Promote Man-Culture and Integral Reform with a View to the Ultimate Establishment of a Divine Social State on Earth, ed. A. E. Newton (Boston: Office of Practical Spiritualists, 1857).

¹⁴ My book begins with a footnote on Derrida's specific understanding of mediation and ends in the blurred space of struggle—representative of a world in which the agentive and cognitive dimensions of technological systems are such that whatever creativity that we express, whatever techniques of self-production that we initiate, those processes are intimately bound to the unknowability of those systems that surround.

¹⁵ See Modern, “My Evangelical Conviction,” Religion 42, no. 3 (July 2102): 439–457.

¹⁶ On the archive as a contingent site of vast mediation, listen to Hayden White's “Foucault Historian?,” (lecture, University of California, Santa Cruz, March 2008), http://humweb.ucsc.edu/foucaultacrossthedisciplines/10_White.mp3.

¹⁷ Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Rockville, Md.: Wildside Press, 2008), 15.