This essay explores the human stakes of theorizing religion in the early nineteenth century, on the borderlands of an expanding U.S. empire. It does so through the lens of a single text, A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner (U.S. Interpreter at the Saut de Ste. Marie) during Thirty Years Residence among the Indians. Published in 1830, the Narrative offers an entrée into the circulation of knowledge and debates about religion among Native Americans and white settlers in a time and place from which we have little record of such debates. Tanner joined in the Midewiwin of the Ojibwe and cultivated the Anishinaabe practice of medicine hunting; held back his own skepticism, perhaps retrospectively exaggerated, at the messages of those he called “Indian prophets”; and discussed the differences, solidified in the telling, between white and Indigenous religions. His editor, Edwin James, meanwhile, drew on comparative scholarship about mythology and religion around the world to defend his own preferred theories about the religious and racial character of Indigenous peoples. Religion has long been theorized far beyond the academy and the centers of empire. Relatively unfamiliar accounts, like Tanner's, reveal how everyday people have engaged with these theories and the consequences of these theories on the ground. Tanner's Narrative, in short, usefully illuminates the webs of knowledge about religion in early America and its human stakes for people caught in the crosshairs of a transforming imperial world.

Charged with enforcing Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission plays an overlooked but profoundly important role in shaping American religious life. While scholars of religion, law, and American culture have devoted a great deal of energy to analyzing the ways that federal courts define religion for the purposes of protecting it, they have paid less attention to the role of administrative agencies, like the EEOC. In this article, I argue that the private workplace offers a critical site for understanding how the state regulates and manages American religious life. I look to the EEOC's regulatory guidelines and compliance manuals as important sources for understanding the shifting relationship between religion, law, and work in the United States. I identify three modes of religiosity—or three types of religious actors—existing in tension in the EEOC archive, each bearing a distinct genealogy: the Sabbath Observer, the Idiosyncratist, and the Organization. While gesturing to very different notions of what religion is, the figures of the Idiosyncratist and the Organization both assume that demands of religion and work can be neatly reconciled. They presume that religion can be seamlessly integrated into the workplace without disrupting the functioning of capitalism. However, for those concerned about economic inequality, corporate power, and neoliberal working conditions, I suggest that it may be useful to revisit the EEOC's Sabbath Observer, who insists on the right to collective forms of life and value outside of work and the market.

Mordecai Kaplan's Judaism as a Civilization (1934) is most often read as Kaplan's effort at a rapprochement between Judaism and America. In contrast to conventional readings of that work, this article highlights Kaplan's suspicion of America, and liberal modernity more generally, by engaging with his analysis of the categories of religion and race. Kaplan, I argue, is haunted by the prospect that in adopting either of these categories, American Judaism will surrender its particularity and collectivity to the liberal, ultimately Christian, state. Indeed, in his own context, Kaplan considered Reform Judaism to be proof of the perils of Jewish accommodation of either category. The article attends to Kaplan's analysis of religion and race as an unlikely resource for thinking through a number of contemporary issues with respect to religion, race, and Jewishness in American life. I argue that Kaplan's anxieties about Christianity and modern liberalism demonstrate a striking prescience about the denaturing of American Judaism in its being annexed to whiteness. The article puts Kaplan into conversation with James Baldwin, who clearly saw Jewish whiteness as yet another casualty of conquest by that “old, rugged Roman cross.” Finally, Kaplan's comments in Civilization about anti-Black racism are few. Read together with his diary, however, they evince sensitivity to the religious constraints put on Black life in America. This article thus concludes by putting Kaplan in conversation with Sylvester Johnson's work on “Black ethnics” and Judith Weisenfeld's research on “religio-racial movements.” This engagement suggests that Kaplan's analysis is not specific to Judaism only, but is more broadly related to the issue of how the modern logics of religion and race continue to discipline expressions of otherness that do not abide by the boundaries of these categories. Kaplan thus contributes an important Jewish vantage on the continued over-determination of American religious life by white Christianity.

In the 1920s, Princeton Seminary professor J. Gresham Machen was the leading fundamentalist intellectual of the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy. His Calvinist theology, commitment to biblical inerrancy, and opposition to liberalism were passed on to and spread by his influential students including Carl McIntire, Harold Ockenga, and Francis Schaeffer. But in the early days of 1906, the young man who would go on to indelibly shape evangelical theology wrote home from Germany where he was a graduate student that he could never go into Christian ministry because of his “moral fault” that no “ordinary man” could understand. This article analyzes the coded language of J. Gresham Machen's letters during his pivotal personal crisis in the context of changing German understandings of “homosexuality” and Machen's lifelong homosocial tendencies. Moreover, it connects Machen's confrontation with his sexuality with his simultaneous confrontation with German liberal theology. In the fall of 1905, Machen found himself drawn to the more experiential and pluralistic Christianity of Wilhelm Herrmann. However, in facing his own perceived immorality, Machen found “Calvinism a very comforting doctrine indeed.” He rejected modernism and spent his life defending a rigid orthodoxy against the theologies that would come to accommodate and embrace queerness. The results of his personal crisis echoed through the history of twentieth-century American evangelicalism. This article analyzes the historical process of “un-queering” theology that emanated from that crisis and demonstrates that resistance to queerness was woven into the ideological fabric of evangelicalism far earlier than scholars have yet recognized.

From its founding in 1987, the Alliance of Baptists’ stance on women in ministry served as the nexus point from which the small denominational body departed from its denominational forebears in the Southern Baptist Convention. As the Alliance adopted more and more progressive theological and social ideas, Southern Baptists adopted more and more conservative counterpoints, at times in response to each other. In 2021, the divergence of these two bodies came to the fore. As members of the Alliance of Baptists adopted a new covenant statement committing the denomination to “act to dismantle systems of white supremacy, patriarchy, and abusive power,” the Southern Baptists had walked away from working through their pro-slavery past and were agitating against critical race theory. Theological moves that began in a debate over women's ordination morphed into larger shifts that redefined what it meant to be a Baptist in the modern United States. How both denominational bodies came to embrace different systems of authority and governance in the late 1980s set both groups on divergent paths, leading to strikingly antithetical positions not only on issues of gender but also on issues surrounding race. The contrast further affirms that questions of gender and religious authority and questions of racism and white supremacy within denominational contexts are not isolated, separate questions but rather are deeply intertwined and related to one another. Overall, this SBC–Alliance history demonstrates how denominational bodies actively consider proximate organizations as they develop their own policies, processes, and public proclamations.

In the early nineteenth century, the “cosmological revolution” reached Americans with no special education or astronomical expertise. New ideas about the scale and nature of the cosmos, some of which had been gestating among elites for centuries, forced ordinary people to reevaluate traditional associations between higher places, higher beings, and higher meaning. As the old “heavens” became more like the modern “space”—larger, emptier, less morally alive—God and his kingdom became more abstract. This trend often mattered to people in ways that esoteric doctrine did not. It divided Americans. A placeless God and “state of being” afterlife found readier acceptance among educated people accustomed to thinking in abstract, immaterial terms and pursuing abstract, immaterial goods. Among nonintellectuals, the new heavens caused unsettling debates between people, and within them, about the locality and reality of higher things. Well before better-remembered disputes over Darwinism and geology, these cosmological debates opened foundational divisions in popular ideas, as some laypeople reluctantly accommodated the new heavens while others turned to defiant cosmic conservatism. On balance, Americans moved toward reformed conceptions of God and heaven, rebuilding divinity in the image of the new cosmos.

The consecration of Samuel Seabury as bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Connecticut in November 1784 is typically taken to mark the threshold that divides the magisterial pretensions of the old-world confessional state from the pluralism of the new-world denominational order. In such accounts, a chastened Anglicanism reluctantly sacrificed its royalism and claims to establishment in acquiescence to the pluralistic religious ecology of the republican United States. The Church of England, in this telling, possessed no native conception of the separation of church and state. The Americanization of Anglicanism, therefore, entailed the acceptance of ecclesiological premises foreign and inimical to its tradition—stemming largely from the intellectual world of the enlightenment and Protestant nonconformity. Such a narrative of denominational beginnings, this article demonstrates, fails to grapple seriously with the strain of antiestablishmentarian thought within Anglicanism itself. The separation of church and state necessarily implicated in Seabury's securing of “a free, valid and purely Ecclesiastical Episcopacy” was neither an alien imposition nor a mere epiphenomenon of American religious liberty. The catholic tendency in Anglicanism had long developed its own conception of ecclesiastical independence, which rejected both state superintendence as well as religious voluntarism. The consecration of Samuel Seabury, this article argues, was secured and defended in an Atlantic milieu characterized by this dual-sided antipathy. By setting the events and controversies surrounding the Seabury consecration back into this broader Atlantic milieu, we will glean a clearer sense of the imperative of ecclesial separateness and distinctiveness that characterized American Episcopalianism in the early republic. American Episcopalianism in the nineteenth century, particularly that of the high church tendency, was remarkably free of the establishmentarian and political impulses of other denominations because it was founded in explicit rejection of them.

This paper examines the writings of Black Shaker visionary Rebecca Jackson, who was active in the middle of the nineteenth century. Jackson's accounts of her dreams, visions, and theology repeatedly demonstrate her deep commitment to celibacy and to obedience to God. Recent work on Jackson reads her celibacy as an example of defiance of white heteropatriarchy; this article suggests that reading her celibacy as disruptive flattens the most animating question in her life: How might I best serve God? Using Jackson's writings, including substantial descriptions of visions and dreams, I argue that her celibacy is a piece of her larger obedience to God, obedience that provides protection and fulfillment. Further, Jackson uses explicitly antiflesh theology to first re-center women in the Biblical story of redemption, and second, serve as the basis for her critique of gendered and racialized violence. Finally, Jackson's celibacy undergirds an understanding of pleasure that blurs the lines between the physical and spiritual, and that, for Jackson, makes possible earthly freedom and spiritual joy.

This article presents a new account of the Catholic Summer School of America (CSSA), founded in 1892 as the “Catholic Chautauqua.” Long relegated to the footnotes of book history and Catholic studies, the Summer School and its reading circle antecedents are here reclaimed for the study of women and American religion. As a Catholic institution, the Summer School was directed by clergy and laymen; men's names fill the published histories of the site as a religious and educational retreat. I argue, however, that it was Summer School women who nurtured a complementary vision of middle-class respectability and intimate association among a white Catholic elite that promoted theirs as the aspirational and ascendant U.S. Catholic “style” at the turn of the new century. Loosened from their parish boundaries, these summer Catholics traveled north to New York's Adirondack region and converged on the lakefront, lecture hall, and ballroom, extending their social networks, and creating an exclusive space of belonging that distinguished themselves from the diverse “immigrant church” at home. With close readings of the traces that Summer School visitors left behind in visual and textual sources—including photographs, postcards, local newspaper reports, and previously overlooked fiction and nonfiction by Catholic women writers—I draw attention to the Summer School during its first decades as a critical site for studying an upwardly mobile white Catholic leisure class concerned with its social and cultural reproduction.

Why has Lucy Harris been blamed for the loss of 116 pages of the Book of Mormon manuscript? Analysis of storytelling about Lucy Harris, Mormonism's first “bad girl,” allows us to see the creation of one element of the Latter-day Saint chain of memory. Through the accretion of stories about Lucy Harris, church members came to code doubt as feminine in Mormon memory while viewing the concept of witness as masculine. These understandings of the relationship between gender and religious faith are embedded understandings in the Latter-day Saint chain of memory. Preserving the memory and reputation of Martin Harris, Lucy's husband, scribe for the Book of Mormon, and one of its three witnesses, allowed Latter-day Saints to cement the intersections of masculinity, priesthood, and witness. Church members used stories about Lucy Harris to teach, discipline, and perform gender norms for future generations of Mormons.

This essay relies on American and newly available Vatican archival sources to reconstruct the ins and outs of the U.S. Catholic Church's involvement in First Amendment litigation between the 1940s and the 1960s. These reveal how Catholic leaders, far from urging the demise of the de facto Protestant establishment, cooperated with Protestants to protect it from legal challenges. They did so not because gaining the acceptance of their non-Catholic neighbors was their paramount concern, nor because American Catholics were more “liberal” than their Roman counterparts. Rather, they saw the “Nation under God” as effectively addressing traditional Catholic critiques of the liberal principle of church-state separation—and therefore a project worthy of their commitment. Ironically, while pursuing goals fully compatible with Roman orthodoxy, they found themselves allied with evangelist Billy Graham and Gideons International long before the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) and Roe v. Wade (1973).

As an amorphous, nonhierarchical collection of associations, evangelicalism has always lacked a clear source of authority. Since Christianity Today's beginning in 1956, it has aspired to serve as the mouthpiece of authoritative evangelical views, presenting itself as the voice of moderation while espousing conservative views with a combative, culture-war stance. With the emergence of the gay rights movement, evangelicals launched a culture war against “homosexuals” as the implicitly secular, liberal Other and then were forced to wrestle with how to apply this stance toward their gay Christian brothers and sisters. Evangelicals' self-conception led to a contradictory stance that they managed to maintain with little variation for decades. Committed to biblical inerrancy, they were definitive in condemning gay sexual behavior, but as self-identified postfundamentalists, they also desired to be compassionate toward gay people. They encouraged gay Christians to change their sexual orientation and simultaneously admitted that such change was impossible for most. Though evangelicals were slow to welcome the ex-gay movement, they eventually embraced it fully as the only plausible escape from their contradictory ideology. The collapse of the movement thus came as a major blow. Many evangelicals began to question the premise that sexual orientation was a chosen, changeable identity and began to rethink the theology of inerrancy that undergirded evangelical hermeneutics. Since 2010, a number of evangelical leaders have challenged CT's claim to represent the evangelical consensus on the issue. In the coming years, the progressive views of younger evangelicals will undoubtedly increase acceptance of same-sex relationships.