This article examines comedian Richard Claxton “Dick” Gregory's comical articulation of religious belief and belonging through his speeches and religious writings during the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that, during his most visible public presence as an activist and comedic entertainer, Gregory bore an irreverent scriptural authority for his readers and comedy audiences who sought a prominent, public affirmation of their suspicion and criticism of religious authorities and conventional religious teachings. This suspicion would allow them to grapple with the oppressive presence of religion in the long history of Western colonialism, in the U.S. context of slavery, and in the violence and segregation of Jim Crow America. Following this religious suspicion, however, Gregory's consistent goal was to implement just social teachings stemming from socially and theologically progressive readings of the Hebrew Bible and of the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels. Gregory's irreverence modeled, and reflected, the maintenance of belief in both the divine and in the justness of remaking an oppressive, violent, unequal world through nonviolent activism in accordance with his understanding of the teachings of the King James scriptures that he read throughout his life. This study of comedy uses one African American male's production of irreverent, authoritative religious rhetoric to display a noteworthy mode of mid-century African American religious liberalism. It is also a case study highlighting the complexity of religious belief and affiliation. Despite acknowledged ambivalences about his commitments to religion, Gregory also modeled ways for audiences to reframe religious commitments to produce social change.

This 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.

Although the civil rights movement has long been framed as a pivotal turning point in twentieth-century U.S. religious history, comparatively little attention has been directed to the role of religion in what has been termed “the long segregation movement.” Likewise, Catholic historians tend to emphasize the exceptional few priests, sisters, and lay people committed to interracial justice over and against the majority of white Catholics who either opposed integration or objected to the means by which it would be achieved. This article argues that, in order to fully understand U.S. Catholicism in the twentieth century, scholars must reckon with the ways racial whiteness shaped the Catholicness of white Catholics. It takes as its primary source more than six hundred letters written by white Catholics outraged and disgusted over the Archdiocese of Chicago's apparent support for desegregation between 1965 and 1968. These letters not only illuminate the inseparability of religion and race, but they also reveal that white Catholicism itself operated as a religio-racial formation in the lives of white Catholics. Given the overwhelming white Catholic (and white religious) resistance to integration, this article argues that the long segregation movement and massive resistance to desegregation ought to be included as signal events in the telling of U.S. Catholic and U.S. religious history.