¹ As quoted in Goldberg, Roselee, Laurie Anderson (New York: Henry N. Abrams, 2000), 38Google Scholar.

² Douglas, Anticipating Mary's point in How Institutions Think (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1986, 3)Google Scholar about the “hold that institutions have on our processes of classifying and recognizing,” Institutional Dream Series is part of Anderson's abiding concern with the “phenomenology of penetration” not as an ominous process but an inevitable one. Noland, Carrie, Poetry at Stake: Lyric Aesthetics and the Challenge of Technology (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 192Google Scholar. There is both a simple and expansive understanding of institutions in Anderson's work. Commercial amusement, race, ethnicity, work, and the gendered body become sites in which the particularities of self, the stuff of one's dreams, are subject to all manner of corporate formation. Representative scholarly works that think about the processes of institutionalism beyond the brick and mortar include Burris, John P., Exhibiting Religion: Colonialism and Spectacle at International Expositions, 1851–1893 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002)Google Scholar, Lofton, Kathryn, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011)Google Scholar, Johnson, Sylvester, The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity: Race, Heathenism, and the People of God (New York: Palgrave, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Camaroff, Jean and Camaroff, John L., Ethnicity, Inc. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Callahan, Richard, Work and Faith in the Kentucky Coal Fields (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008)Google Scholar, Gerber, Lynne, Seeking the Straight and Narrow: Weight Loss and Sexual Reorientation in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012)Google Scholar, and Murphy, Michelle, Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ Sacred Companies: Organizational Aspects of Religion and Religious Aspects of Organizations, eds. Demerath, N. J. III, Hall, Peter Dobkin, Schmitt, Terry, and Williams, Rhys H. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 62Google Scholar. See, also, the groundbreaking The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, eds. Powell, Walter W. and Dimaggio, Paul J. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)Google Scholar and Friedland, Roger's “Divine Institution: Max Weber's Value Spheres and Institutional Theory,” Research in the Sociology of Organizations 41 (2014): 217–258CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ Maffly-Kipp, Laurie, “The Burdens of Church History,” Church History 82, no. 2 (June 2013): 356, 366CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ Ibid., 361, 365.

⁶ This would require a tweaking of Charles Taylor's useful concept of the “social imaginary,” used to refer to “the way in which people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations” (“Modern Social Imaginaries,” Public Culture 14, no. 1 [Winter 2002]: 106Google Scholar).

⁷ On the scholarly effect of such liberal sentiment, see Fessenden, Tracy, “The Problem of the Postsecular,” American Literary History 26, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 154–167CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ Albanese, Catherine L., A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Cox, Robert S., Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003)Google Scholar; McGarry, Molly, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Caterine, Darryl, Haunted Ground: Journeys Through a Paranormal America (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2011)Google Scholar; Josephson, Jason Ananda, “God's Shadow: Occluded Possibilities in the Genealogy of ‘Religion,’” History of Religions 52, no. 4 (May 2013): 309–339CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ Maffly-Kipp, “The Burdens of Church History,” 354.

¹⁰ Ibid., 355.

¹¹ Ibid., 353.

¹² Ibid., 355.

¹³ Ibid., 355–356.

¹⁴ Few people who have read Marx or Foucault affirm the kind of agent that Maffly-Kipp fears is trending during this scholarly flight away from institutional concerns. The analysis of social forces in light of ideology, affect, and/or disciplinary mechanisms is often central to most work that draws on Marx or Foucault.

¹⁵ On the discourse of non-specific protestantism, see Fessenden, Tracy, Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007)Google Scholar. Cultural analysis seems to be a fruitful approach to the shadowy Christian character of American society, with its local and general styles of piety and practices of solidarity, for there is a voluntarism at the heart of liberal subjectivity as well as an evangelical public sphere. In order to even begin to gain analytic purchase on the common sense epistemics of white protestant masculinity, even an expanded understanding of religious institution must be supplemented by questions of ideology and discourse.

¹⁶ Although I do not have space to address the occlusions at work in the use of church as an analytic in the institutional setting of church history, I wonder whether a séance table could become the subject of sustained scrutiny in Maffly-Kipp's renewed church history paradigm? Could an auditing session of early Scientology or an instance of Reichian group therapy at Esalen? What about online activity that is at once most intimate and particular and already a focus on institutional reform, i.e., the totalizing schemes of predictive analytics? (See “Predictive Analytics,” IBM, http://www-03.ibm.com/software/products/en/category/predictive-analytics.) What about watching an episode of Oprah with the secure knowledge that millions of others are or have or will be watching the same episode and feeling the same kind of thing? I would hope that these examples be included in a comparative frame—for these too are part of an institutional history of American religion.

¹⁷ Maffly-Kipp, “The Burdens of Church History,” 360.

¹⁸ Ibid., 359.

¹⁹ Pauck, Wilhelm, “The Idea of Church in Christian History,” Church History 21, no. 3 (September 1952): 192CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁰ Pauck, “The Idea of Church in Christian History,” 211–213. A unified Christianity may well be on the horizon, suggested Pauck, presaged by the “rapprochement of the several Protestant groups and churches toward one another” (192). This conciliatory momentum would be more fully developed in the various conformity critiques of the 1950s, including Herberg, Will's Protestant, Catholic, Jew (New York: Doubleday, 1955)Google Scholar.

²¹ Such a line of inquiry would be attentive to market rhetorics, political economy, and scientific theories of management. See, for example, Scientology's construction of a “leading edge[] of Christian experience” (Maffly-Kipp, “The Burdens of Church History,” 366) in the 1950s. See, also, the relationship between religion and the language of systems management in “Strength and Weakness of the Popular Religion and of Liberal Christianity,” Christian Examiner 64 (March 1858): 209–233Google Scholar; Weeks, Louis B., “The Incorporation of the Presbyterians,” in The Organizational Revolution: Presbyterians and American Denominationalism, Coalter, Milton J., et al. , eds. (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992)Google Scholar, and Corrigan, John, Business of the Heart: Religion and Emotion in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)Google Scholar. For perspective on the institutional difference that modernity makes, see Wagner, Harvey M., “Practical Slants on Operations Research,” Harvard Business Review, Vol. 41 (May–June, 1963): 61–71Google Scholar; Chandler, Alfred, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Haraway, Donna J., “Signs of Dominance: From a Physiology to a Cybernetics of Primate Society,” Studies in History of Biology 6 (1983): 129–219Google Scholar; and Hughes, Agatha C. and Hughes, Thomas Parke. Systems, Experts, and Computers: The Systems Approach in Management and Engineering, World War II and After (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²² Maffly-Kipp, 363. One could argue that the tables have been turned for a while now, or perhaps never even set up. The citational life of Marx within the pages of Church History would be an interesting digital humanities project to pursue. As far as I can tell, there has been little engagement with Foucault's idea outside the quick reference in book review or commentaries. He is cited in a handful of articles (mostly as an authority on monasticism) and mentioned occassionaly in a book review or commentary but precious few instances in the last 40 years where Foucault is being called up to expand the methodological horizon of church history. The lack of sustained engagement is regrettable. Exceptions include: Gitre, Edward J., “The 1904–05 Welsh Revival: Modernization, Technologies, and Techniques of the Self,” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 73, no. 4 (December 2004): 792–827CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brakke, David, “The Making of Monastic Demonology: Three Ascetic Teachers on Withdrawal and Resistance” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 70, no. 1 (March 2001): 19–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Clark, Elizabeth A., “The Lady Vanishes: Dilemmas of a Feminist Historian after the ‘Linguistic Turn,’” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 67, no. 1 (March 1998): 1–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²³ I am thinking, in particular, of Marx on ideology and commodity fetishism and Foucault on the religious origins of secular modes of governmentality. See, for example, Foucault, Michel, “The Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed., eds. Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Rabinow, Paul (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 208–226Google Scholar. In keeping with Maffly-Kipp's insistence on scholarly reflexivity, Marx and Foucault might help illuminate the scholarly monisms and reductionisms that occur, in part, because of the unspecified and unacknowledged protestantisms that course through the methodological framework of the field. On the practical use of Marx, Foucault, and other forms of cultural analysis, see the special issue on the field of American religions for Religion 42, no. 3 (June 2012). This collection of essays, edited by Finbarr Curtis, offer a powerful critique of the legacy of church history in the study of American religion.

²⁴ Walter W. Powell and Paul J. Dimaggio, “Introduction,” The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, 11.

²⁵ Maffly-Kipp 361.

²⁶ Ibid., 362. For promising lines of inquiry into the institutional expanse of American religion, see Michael Warner's work on transnationalism and the evangelical public sphere, Susan Harding's analysis of the force of linguistic networks, Jason Bivins' anatomy of the institutional lives of fear, and Courtney Bender's mapping of new age social networks in Cambridge, MA. Michael Warner, “The Evangelical Public Sphere” [http://repository.upenn.edu/rosenbach/2/]; Harding, Susan Friend, The Book of Jerry Falwell; Fundamentalist Language and Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Bivins, Jason C., Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Contemporary Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bender, Courtney, The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Other works that betray more than a casual reading of Foucault and Marx but nonetheless address the methodological problems at hand include Keane, Webb, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Engelke, Matthew's God's Agents: Biblical Publicity in Contemporary England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hazard, Sonia's “The Material Turn in the Study of Religion,” Religion and Society 4 (2013): 58–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.