In the 1950s, the United States experienced a domestic religious revival that offered postwar Americans a framework to interpret the world and its unsettling international political problems. Moreover, the religious message of the cold war that saw the God-fearing West against atheistic communists encouraged an unprecedented ecumenism in American history. Jews, formerly objects of indifference if not disdain and hatred in the United States, were swept up in the ecumenical tide of “Judeo-Christian” values and identity and, essentially, “Christianized” in popular and political culture. Not surprisingly, these cultural trends affected images of the recently formed State of Israel. In the popular and political imagination, Israel was formed by the “Chosen People” and populated by prophets, warriors, and simple folk like those in Bible stories. The popular celebration of Israel also romanticized its people at the expense of their Arab (mainly Muslim) neighbors. Battling foes outside of the Judeo-Christian family, Israelis seemed just like Americans. Americans treated the political problems of the Middle East differently than those in other parts of the world because of the religious significance of the “Holy Land.” A man such as Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who combined views of hard-nosed “realpolitik” with religious piety, acknowledged the special status of the Middle East by virtue of the religions based there. Judaism, part of the “Judeo-Christian civilization,” benefitted from this religious consciousness, while Islam remained a religion and a culture apart. This article examines how the American image of Jews, Israelis, and Middle Eastern politics was re-framed in the early 1950s to reflect popular ideas of religious identity. These images were found in fiction, the press, and the speeches and writings of social critics and policymakers. The article explores the role of the 1950s religious revival in the identification of Americans with Jews and Israelis and discusses the rise of the popular understanding that “Judeo-Christian” values shaped American culture and politics.

This article makes several claims about the relationship between praise and worship music and prosperity megachurches. First, it argues that the prosperity gospel has had a significant impact on contemporary worship music in America owing to its leadership in the twin rise of the megachurch and televangelism. Second, beginning in the 1990s, prosperity megachurches pioneered forms of worship music mimicking “arena rock” that capitalized on both the scale of their sanctuaries and the sophistication of their audio/visual production. The result was a progression toward music that would be a liturgy of timing, lighting, volume and performance designed for large venues. Finally, prosperity megachurches were ideally situated to benefit from this new music, both in the music industry and in their theology. Prosperity megachurches partnered with the expanding worship industry in the creation of new worship music, while the prosperity gospel theologically undergirded the affective power and performative pageantry of Christian arena rock, narrating worship music as a tool for releasing spiritual forces of prosperity. The result was a Sunday experience for the blessed that reinforced the celebration of God’s abundant blessings through music that was bigger, better, and louder.

In order to understand the practice of “culture wars work,” we examined the claims of a particularly vocal evangelist, Jack T. Chick. Chick is a writer and cartoonist known both positively and negatively for his “Chick tracts.” Chick tracts are small twenty-four-page black-andwhite comic books that attempt to convert the reader to Chick's particular brand of “Bible-believing” Protestant Christianity. We focused on Chick's claim about Catholicism in order to show how theological and ideological boundaries can be constructed between presumably allied religious populations. Chick presents his anti-Catholicism using three main frames: (1) the associative frame—Catholicism is not only one of many social problems but is also cause of a number of them, (2) the subversive frame—the Catholic church is a political villain, and (3) the hidden agenda frame—Catholicism has not remained true to the authoritative teachings of Christianity and has embraced a secretly progressive worldview. Investigating a culture war claims maker like Chick, who purposely disrupts what presumably would be an orthodox or conservative alliance, reveals the process of symbolic boundary making within cultural/ moral/religious conflicts.

Ten miles east of Bighorn Canyon in northern Wyoming, you start to climb up out of the desert heat toward Medicine Mountain, looming in the distant haze. At this point, Highway 14A begins a torturous seven-mile ascent along a 10 percent grade, rising ever higher into sweet clover and green meadows, spruce trees and lodgepole pines. Staying in first or second gear the whole way up, your engine still overheats by the time you have reached the crest. But, if you follow the small National Forest sign off to the left near the summit and walk another mile and a half after parking the car, you come to what seems to be the top of the world: the Great Medicine Wheel, high in the Big-horn Mountains, an ancient eighty-foot diameter circle of rocks with a cairn in the center and twenty-eight spokes radiating out to the rim.

Pentecostalism first appeared as a global movement, built with both modern and antimodern materials provided by the American holiness missionary movement. On the anti-modern side, radical holiness spirituality and theology infused the worldviews of its advocates with supernaturalism, primitivism, and an apocalyptic eschatology. It resisted modern trends toward systematization, bureaucratization, and centralized control. Furthermore, radical holiness minimized the significance of modern categories of nation, ethnicity, race, and civilization. On the other side, radical holiness depended on the modern disintegration of traditional religious deference, used modern techniques for promoting audiencedriven or democratized patterns of authority, and effectively equipped its followers for the pragmatic methodologies of modernity by skillfully making use of transportation networks, fund-raising techniques, and mass media to reach large audiences.

American holiness missionaries carried these characteristics overseas, where non-American advocates adapted them to their particular circumstances. Both American and non-American adherents promoted radical holiness in ways that confounded reigning categories of identity, power relations, and conceptions of East and West. Radical holiness granted religious authority to Chinese men, Indian girls, spirit-filled Zulus, working-class Chileans, female evangelists, and African-American leaders, as well as white American males, without consciously mobilizing its followers along lines of national, ethnic, gendered, racial, or class identity. It demanded that its followers leave "heathenism," but it did so without utilizing the imperialist era discourse of civilization that upheld western cultural superiority and non-western cultural inferiority. In terms of its national or racial characteristics, then, early leaders from diverse backgrounds used tools from the American holiness movement to bring a non-American movement, world Pentecostalism, into existence.

In the Gilded Age of extreme partisan politics, Puck magazine, the nation's premier journal of graphic humor and political satire, played an important role as a non-partisan crusader for good government and the triumph of American constitutional ideals. Its prime targets, however, were not just corrupt machine politicians. The magazine included as well what it, like the letterpress, condemned as the nefarious political agenda of the Catholic church, especially its new pope, Leo XIII. Indeed, New York's infamous Tammany Hall, committed to spoils and patronage as the means of dominating the body politic, was all the more dangerous to Puck because, beginning in the 1870s, Irish Catholics dominated it. The hall's Irish Catholic base enabled the magazine to rationalize more completely its conviction that the Catholic church, ruled by a foreign potentate dressed in the irrational garb of infallibility, was a menace not only to the nation's body politic but also to its democratic soul. If allowed to proceed unimpeded, the pope and his minions, along with Tammany's bosses and supporters, would convert the nation into their personal fiefdom. Puck was not about to let that happen. In cartoons and editorials spanning two decades, the magazine blasted and often conjoined both Tammany and the papacy with invidious comparisons that left few readers in doubt as to their complicity. Although scholars have noted how the American letterpress also alluded to a connection between Tammany and the Catholic church, Puck's unparalleled comprehensive strategy to perpetuate and strengthen that connection has never been scrutinized. This essay redresses that oversight of an age when the public and its politicians reckoned very seriously the editorial artistry of great political cartoonists, especially those who drew for Puck.

In the years between 1830 and 1860, anti-Catholicism in America became unprecedentedly virulent. In 1834, the Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts, was burned to the ground by an angry mob, touched off in large part by the anti-Catholic sermons of Lyman Beecher and rumors of convent abuses spread by Rebecca Reed. The following years saw several attempts by State governments to legislate against convents as well as numerous incidents of violence. In 1839, thousands of people in Baltimore rioted for three days and threatened to destroy a Carmelite convent. Five years later, rioting mobs in Philadelphia killed thirteen people and left blocks of Catholic homes and two Catholic churches smoldering in ruins. And, throughout the 1850's, a political party called the Know-Nothings convulsed the nation with its violent hostility toward Catholics. The worst incidents occurred in St. Louis, where ten people were killed in 1854, and in Louisville, where twenty were killed in 1855. The Know-Nothings diminished in popularity only with the turmoil of the Civil War.

In the winter of 1905, leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (L.D.S. or the “Mormons”) departed Utah on two, seemingly disparate, missions to the east coast. One contingent went to defend their church at Senate hearings in Washington, D.C.; the other, to Vermont to dedicate a monument to church founder Joseph Smith. These forays into national politics and religious memory re-fashioned Latter-day Saint identity, as well as public perception of Mormonism, for the remainder of the twentieth Century They also illuminate one of the quotidian mysteries of religion: how it adapts to the demands of time yet maintains its sense of mediating the eternal. It is axiomatic that religious communities are not exempt from the human condition; they must adapt to their temporal circumstances or die. What is not as often recognized is that churches bring a particular burden to this task because they offer their believers the hope of transcending time.

Philip Gleason has observed that the Roman Catholic church in the United States has been an “institutional immigrant” for much of its history. The idea of an “institutional immigrant,” posed in the Singular and distinguished from “the immigrant peoples who comprised the Catholic population,” presupposes a basic if undefined unity to American Catholicism. The nature of that unity has always been a highly contested issue. Gleason's formulation also suggests that the experience of the Catholic church is illuminated by considering its history in light of the processes that have occupied students of immigration—Americanization, generational transition, assimilation, the invention of ethnicity, and the like. The nature of these processes has also given rise to debates as Americans grapple to understand their cultural identity. In short, Gleason's idea lends itself to debate about the normative significance of American Catholicism, American culture, and their relationship to one another. In the interest of enriching this debate, I would suggest that the Roman Catholic church in the United States has also been an institutional emigrant.

No churchgoer born before 1960 can forget the childhood thrill of hearing a missionary speak in church. The missionary arrived in native dress to thank the congregation for its support and, after the service, showed slides in the church hall. The audience sat transfixed, imagining what it might be like to eat termites in Africa, or beg on the streets in India, or study the Bible in a refugee camp. The usually mundane Sunday service became exotic and exciting, as the world beyond the United States suddenly seemed real. In an age before round-the-clock television news, and the immigration of Asians and Latin Americans even to small towns in the Midwest, the missionary on furlough was a major link between the world of North American Christians and the rest of the globe.

Since the publication fifty years ago of Robert N. Bellah's classic article “Civil Religion in America,” the concept of civil religion has provoked continuing debates among scholars who study religion and American culture. This essay is a contribution to these debates and an attempt to move beyond them. It considers American civil religion as theory and as practice, examining its meaning through an investigation of how it functioned at an important and too little studied point in its past. Arguing that civil religion is both a cultural and a political construct, it shows how at the close of World War I, a loosely linked network of civic, military, and patriotic groups came together to create a sacralized form of patriotic nationalism and incorporate it into the American civil religious tradition. Contending that the relationships between civil religion and more conventional forms of organized religion are often close and at times contentious, it examines how religious bodies of the time were instrumental in supporting this process and intractable in resisting it. Proposing that civil religion can come in a variety of sometimes competing versions, it discusses the conflicts over civil religious practices that ensued within American churches during the next decade, relying on reports from the time to describe how these conflicts divided church leaders, denominations, and congregations. Finally, working from the premise that civil religious beliefs, symbols, and rituals are invariably involved in the political process, it examines how they became increasingly used for partisan purposes over the course of the decade, raising issues about the relationship between church and state. In closing, it comments on the enduring character of civil religion, and speculates on its continuing importance for American religion and politics.

Evangelist Billy Sunday (1862–1935) is well-known for an aggressively masculine platform style that was clearly aimed at attracting a male audience to his urban revival campaigns. Less recognized but equally important are Sunday's meetings for “women only,” in which the handsome, athletic evangelist preached passionate, explicit sermons on sexual vice to an audience that had been purged of all male interlopers. Though Sunday's ostensible purpose was to reinforce traditional Victorian morality—the sermons were originally meant to rail against birth control—the social context for his message subtly undermined its conservative aim. As is illustrated by his campaign in Boston during the winter of 1916–1917, Sunday was perceived by many of his contemporaries, both men and women, as scandalously frank to the point of sexual crudeness. Critics and supporters alike described him in the same terms they used for vaudeville and theater idols, a notion that ex-baseball player Sunday did little to dispel. Yet, evangelical Protestant women came to hear his muscular Christian message anyway. The ability of his female audiences to adapt to—and obviously enjoy— Sunday's physical stage presence suggests that often-used terms like “feminization” and “masculinization” are too stark to describe the transition from Victorian to modern forms of religious behavior. Women's response to Sunday, situated at the intersection of evangelical religion and popular entertainment culture, demonstrates the durability of feminine religious tastes and suggests ways in which the blurring and confusion of formal gender categories factored into the transition from Victorian piety into the more individualized, popularized forms of religious faith in the twentieth century. Women were not passive observers in the transformation of American religion but central to the nature and direction of its survival.

In October 1998, Matthew Shepard, a young gay student at the University of Wyoming, was brutally murdered. Upon hearing the news, many Americans described him as a victim of a hate crime. Others, however, proclaimed Shepard a gay martyr. This declaration was not simply political rhetoric. Despite long-standing conservative religious opposition to homosexuality, they believed that Shepard had been granted salvation and a place among the saints in heaven. This article addresses the questions, “How and why was Matthew Shepard declared a popular martyr?” More specifically, how does this popular martyrdom relate to contemporary debates surrounding civil rights for gays and lesbians in America? As part of a series of social movements that followed the Second World War, sexual minorities have struggled to claim legitimate space in American society, leaving dramatic social changes in their wake. Noting this, while contrasting the news media’s construction of Shepard with the simultaneous popular discussion on the Internet, this article argues that a long tradition of popular martyr-making came together with social and political circumstances at a certain historical moment to transform the obscure victim of a hate crime into a popular martyr residing in heaven. That is, although the news media constructed Shepard as simply the affable young victim of a fatal hate crime, these contingencies allowed many Americans to reconstruct Shepard as a popular martyr. They expressed this belief in political, cultural, and social action. In time, Shepard's popular martyrdom helped further a growing acceptance of gays and lesbians into America's mainstream.

Environmental concern is emerging in all major American religious denominations, a process known as the “greening of religion.” The dynamics of a greening process illustrate how individuals incorporate emergent social concerns into their existing moral worldviews and show the ways in which religious identities shape that process. Analyzing the dynamics of this phenomenon reveals much about how a community understands the meaning of religious conversion, demonstrates the stability of religious identities, and illustrates how leaders use new problems to reframe religious identities. The greening of American Catholicism builds upon prior efforts to extend a practical theology of social justice (conversion) but articulates new moral responsibilities for future generations while reinforcing identity (continuity). Pope John Paul II opened a new domain for Catholic social teaching by his numerous teachings about environmental stewardship. U.S. Catholic greening efforts built organically upon the Catholic social teaching initiatives of the 1980s, addressing peace and economic justice, and the emergence of what some refer to as a “distinctly Catholic” contribution to environmental ethics should be interpreted in light of these efforts. This term is not precisely defined, but it suggests a concern for cultivating environmental values within the framework of a Catholic identity and for not subverting Catholic religious identity to conventional “secular” environmental values. The rhetorical framing of environment concerns by an ethic of justice was drawn from the biblical vision of justice, but it was influenced by the American environmental justice movement that emerged during this period. The most innovative expression of the greening of American Catholicism has been a set of regional initiatives, bringing Catholic social vision to bear on local issues through lay civic engagement. The lessons from this study speak to the broad evolution of religious environmental ethics in American culture and can inform future studies of this transreligious phenomenon.

In early 1710, a small group of parishioners approached Francis Le Jau, the Anglican missionary to St. James Parish in South Carolina. He recognized them all as regular churchgoers, and he was pleased when they asked him to admit them to Holy Communion. Yet he hesitated, because the men admitted that, having been “born and baptized among the Portuguese,” they were Roman Catholics. Le Jau was always cautious in such cases, he assured church authorities in London. He told the men that he would need them first to renounce “the errors of the Popish Church” before he would allow them the sacrament. He then suggested that they give the matter some thought over the next few months.

In 1987, two women hatched a business plan that became Creative Memories, a direct-marketing company that sells scrapbook materials and techniques to a mostly female clientele through a worldwide network of sales consultants. By the beginning of the new millennium, millions of people had participated in Creative Memories workshops. Many successful imitators also flooded the crafting market with specialized publications, Web sites, tools, and materials, creating an industry worth $2.55 billion by 2004.

As significant as the economic impact of scrapbooking is, however, the claims of importance made by its practitioners rate closer examination. Promising to keep photos safe from deterioration, Creative Memories also sold a worldview, reflected across the industry, that such preservation is essential to human flourishing. Such a claim invites considerations both of how the promoters of memory-keeping envision its working and how memory-keepers themselves distinctively shape their practice. This article takes the view that album-making constitutes a kind of innovative female meaning-making (that is, religion) shaped, in part, by American-style Common Sense epistemology while also reflecting what we might call a sidelong feminism, in which a woman expresses agency, claims her voice, and declares the complexity of her full humanity, all by using modes that, on the surface, appear compliant with patriarchy. This article also uses certain notions of religious testimony to gauge the space between the Common Sense project of the album-making industry and the results produced by album-makers themselves.

Recent academic use of the word “evangelical” in American history has been surprisingly static. Drawing upon scholars of “evangelicalism,” historians have been tied to an “essentialist,” or doctrinal, definition of evangelicalism that stretches unbroken from the early eighteenth century to the present. Such ahistorical readings, however, obscure a far more interesting and complex reality. This essay argues that from the Protestant Reformation through the early twentieth century, to be “evangelical” was most often a Protestant-inflected way of being in the world, which at times could have multiple, changing, and contested doctrinal associations. It was a flexible and dynamic idiom, intended to communicate a relative biblical authenticity by those who wielded it. In particular, this essay seeks to recover three overlooked dimensions of the use of the word “evangelical”: first, the firmly Protestant and even anti-Catholic implication of the term that spanned the history of Protestantism from the 1520s to the twentieth century; second, the relative authenticity, “true-Christian” usage, which contained within it a strong “primitivist” impulse with reference to New Testament Christianity; and third, the contested nature of the word, particularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when “evangelical” identity supposedly started to become more recognizable.

This article examines the ways that ethnic pluralism and Jewish exceptionalism coexisted in philosopher Horace M. Kallen’s thought from the time that Jewish identity began to play a significant and positive role in his own self-conception, roughly in 1900, until his coining of “cultural pluralism” in 1924. Kallen conceived of pluralism, in large part, to address concerns about American Jewish identity, but its conception created a vexing problem for Jews. If Jews were the “chosen people,” then how could they fit into a model of the nation that emphasized equality, or at least harmony, between many different groups? Kallen would solve the dilemma of pluralism and chosenness by advocating that American Jews maintain their particularity on the basis of cultural distinctiveness rather than of superiority. Interrogating Kallen's thought on this question illuminates how his enduring theory of cultural pluralism owed its origins, in part, to specific Jewish concerns and how it developed in conjunction with a sustained struggle to articulate a meaningful Jewish identity that would prove continuous across generations. Kallen’s solution to the dilemma of pluralism and Jewish exceptionalism also demonstrates one instance of how debates about Jewish particularity profoundly influenced understandings of cultural, racial, and religious difference within American democracy during the early twentieth century.