Over the course of the twentieth century, dozens of conservative Protestant ministers were accused of sexual deviance—including instances of same-sex acts and attractions. Protestant churches, in turn, experimented with employing various tactics to undermine and challenge such accusations. From silencing and secrecy to public censure and disassociation, denominational bodies labored to undermine evidence of queerness among their ministers. This essay surveys a one-hundred-year history of religious groups’ and institutions’ attempts at dealing with the uncomfortable but persistent allegations of not-quite-straightness among their leaders. This story accounts for how conservative Protestantism has been able to maintain its claims to a particular kind of sexual morality even as religious leaders themselves have repeatedly jeopardized this project.

This article examines the anti-antisemitism novels of the 1940s as an indication of the decade's changing attitudes toward Jews, antisemitism, and religious pluralism, and so contributes to scholarly research on both social protest literature and mid-twentieth-century American religious culture. Recent scholarship has shown that American Jews responded to the Holocaust earlier than had previously been assumed. The anti-antisemitism novels of the 1940s were one of the popular culture arenas in which this response to the horrors of Nazi Germany occurred, as fiction proved an ideal genre for imagining and presenting possible solutions to the problem of antisemitism. These solutions often involved a change from a racial to a religious conception of Jews. Laura Z. Hobson's Gentleman's Agreement (1947) was the most culturally significant of this 1940s genre of anti-antisemitism novels (a subgenre of social protest literature), in part because of its foregrounding of non-Jewish responses to antisemitism. Archival research into the roots of Hobson's novel reveals that news of other female authors writing popular anti-antisemitism fiction encouraged Hobson, allowing Hobson to feel part of a movement of anti-antisemitism writers that would eventually extend to her readers, as demonstrated by readers’ letters. Although Will Herberg's Protestant, Catholic, Jew (1955) is frequently cited as the midcentury book that heralded a postwar shift toward religious pluralism, the anti-antisemitism novels of the 1940s reveal signs of this shift a decade earlier.

This paper considers how print culture was mobilized in the early 1990s to transmit spiritual beliefs, experiences, and emotions through an examination of the pragmatics of reading endorsed by Jewish Lights Publishing (founded in 1990). Using interviews, advertisements, internal memos, books, jacket copy, and reviews, this study reconstructs the ecology out of which Jewish Lights Publishing emerged, as well as the goals and assumptions about Judaism, Jews, and books that animated the creation of a new, and specifically spiritual, Jewish press. I argue that what makes Jewish Lights a spiritual press is not only the content and design of the books, but also the instructions the press offers for how to use the books it produces. This paper is not only about the production and circulation of spiritual Jewish books, but the production and circulation of beliefs about what spiritual Jewish books do for an imagined community of readers.

Like much of the American West, a history of material conquest and natural resource extraction has precluded sustained study of Montana's religious past. This article uses the case of gold miners in the southwestern corner of the Territory of Montana from 1862 to 1889 to argue for the value of place-based studies of American religious experience. Rather than serving as a restrictive lens, place-based studies reveal religion in process. In Montana gold mining communities, religion was produced and reproduced through the labors of daily life, intricately tied to the limits and possibilities of place, never static or complete. Protestant missionaries adopted alternative tools of evangelism to fit the particularities of place. Those who succeeded found that the “get-saved-quick” approach of revivals appealed to the “get-rich-quick” lifestyle of mining communities. Dominated by male miners, defined by physical toil for uncertain reward, and subject to national economic trends, gold rush communities reveal how religion shifts and transforms in relation to labor, gender relations, and the natural world. Situated at the nexus of mineral extraction and missionary adaptation and appropriation, this article reflects on the ways in which religion in the United States develops across borders and through practical engagement with regional landscapes.