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This article responds to the provocation: what happens if we put minority traditions of thought and ideology—in this case, more specifically Catholics—into the narrative of early America? This article hints at the alternative to our textbooks and lectures: a strange and unexpected inclusion of early American Catholics during a kind of golden era initiated by imperial conflict in the early 1770s which ran to the 1840s. As historians revise broad histories of exclusion and marginalization in early American civil and intellectual life, it points to a Catholic counterpoint—and Catholic ascendence—one that was extant before the Revolution and extended deep into the antebellum era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term nothingarian suggests an under-studied presence in the history of the early republic: the religiously unaffiliated. Scholars routinely mention the term nothingarian , but few have examined its origins, uses, or significance in American history. Although it seems to have originated much earlier, as a term for members of the little-known Gortonist sect in Rhode Island, "nothingarian" would come to connote the irreligious, ambivalent, or unaffiliated person, one whom pollsters of religion today might call a "none," or a person of no organized religion. The fear of nothingarians was especially acute in the early republic because of the widespread disestablishment of official denominations, rapid spread of settlement on the frontier, and deep uncertainties about American national cohesion after independence. Many observers in early national America feared that disestablishment and religious choice would lead not to massive numbers of conversions, but to masses of indifferent, skeptical, or unaffiliated people. The term nothingarian is important because it was widely used (if poorly defined), and because it reflected widespread fears about preserving religious affiliation and building a new American nation in the absence of state churches or a national establishment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the American Religious Ecologies project, located at http://religiousecologies.org and developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

Research about the religion and environmental attitudes relationship in the United States has yielded mixed results. Some studies find that religion relates to heightened concern about environmental threats and greater environmental interest whereas others find religion relates to diminished concern and interest. A new perspective that applies ideas from psychology and sociology may help resolve these discrepant findings. It is hypothesized that religious meaning reduces concern with environmental threats since meaning helps people cope with distressing stimuli. This reduction is specific to threats and does not extend to environmental interest. Using the 2016 General Social Survey to test this hypothesis, after controlling for sociodemographic and political variables, structural equation modeling shows Americans who are more religious experience diminished sense of danger from environmental threats, yet exhibit heightened general environmental interest. These findings align with the proposed theory and suggest new ways to promote environmentalism and policy change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians of migration have extensively studied the economic, social, and political impact of migration and the secular changes amongst diasporic communities, but changes in religious faith, practice and institutions remain opaque. Yet, they form part of the most intimate aspect of the lives transformed in movement and were, in fact, the most active fault line in diasporic communities and at home. However, in relation to religion in the Middle East, historians have hardly paid any attention to movement of people and ideas across and beyond the geographical boundaries of the region. This makes our understanding at best incomplete and, in some instances, incorrect in identifying the sources, dynamics and reasons for change in religious institutions and faith. This article attempts to fill these lacunae by looking at an example of how migration inflected religious institutions and how faith and religion shaped the migratory experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religion and corporate organization have developed side-by-side in Western culture, from antiquity to the present day. This Essay begins with the realignment of religion and secularity in seventeenth-century America, then looks to the religious antecedents of corporate organization in ancient Rome and medieval Europe, and then looks forward to the modern history of corporate organization. This Essay describes the long history behind the entanglement of business and religion in the United States today. It also shows how an understanding of both religion and business can be expanded by looking at the economic aspects of religion and the religious aspects of business. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the study of American religion, scholars use the category folk to illuminate the religious worlds of populations on the margins of society. The category has been deployed to valorize the unique cultures of populations while extending the meaning and function of religion beyond conventional markers. Judith Weisenfeld's religio-racial concept underscores how different state bureaucracies played an important role in the daily religious worlds of Black laypeople. This article applies Weisenfeld's contribution to American religion by demonstrating that the folk category also sheds light on the agency of state actors and networks. Using the 1931 Macon County, Alabama, venereal disease program, I will argue that the folk category was part of the state's biomedical campaign to regulate the daily religious cultures of the Black poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews the origins and goals of the religio-racial framework that grounds the approach to early twentieth-century Black new religious movements in New World A-Coming. It discusses how the articles in the roundtable offer case studies that extend the framework of "religio-racial identity" to model approaches for locating the analysis of connections between race and religion as central to the work of religious studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues for understanding the practices of the Kabbalah Centre as "combinative American religion," Catherine Albanese's theory of metaphysical American religion, which better reveals its founder's and practitioners' negotiation of the United States in the twentieth century than the terms mysticism or New Religious Movement (NRM). The use of mysticism to describe Kabbalah has been debated in the study of Judaism. Debates over the term mysticism , the "authenticity" of Kabbalah as mysticism , or even specific examples such as the Kabbalah Centre's founder Philip Berg as "authentic" Kabbalah obscure the historical question: how has the Kabbalah Centre been an example of American religion? Highlighting the Kabbalah Centre's combinative tendency shows how similar the Kabbalah Centre is to other religious practices in the United States. This article analyzes Philip Berg and the Kabbalah Centre as an example of how practices typically understood in a trajectory of Jewish history also have a place in American history, expanding the complexity of both historiographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the 1840s, numerous intentional communities based on a cooperative financial model were organized across the United States. Primarily led by social reformers and often based on the writings of French utopian Charles Fourier, these communities acted as a response to social and economic inequity. As part of their challenge to nineteenthcentury social conventions, these communities refrained from including any religious test or expectation of religious adherence for members. The result was the development of spaces where new religious movements and diverse religious expressions emerged, sometimes resulting in communal strife. This article argues that diverse religious expressions were cultivated across these communities, if unevenly. The article highlights three case studies in which religious expression proved a central component of communal organization, social harmony, or community discord. These communities include Trumbull Phalanx in Ohio, Northampton Association of Education and Industry in Massachusetts, and Ceresco in Wisconsin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay I present the case of Baltimore native Joseph Howard Lee, whose self-presentation in the 1920s and 1930s as the West African Jew Bata Kindai Amgoza ibn LoBagola, captured the attention of white American consumers of his lectures and writings that purported to offer insight into African religions, culture, and history. I propose that viewing his career not only as one of imposture, but also as involving religious humbug, brings his performative critique of white Christian America to the fore. Locating such religious humbug within the bounds of the study of religion in America challenges scholars to engage African American religious history in more complex ways than the conventional deployment of Black religion as moral prod to the conscience of white America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Uncritical celebrations and excoriations of "religion" are as ubiquitous as those accruing to technology. This article explores the cultural production of normative "religion" and pluralism through two technologies whose connections may not be obvious. A 1991 Time magazine devoted to what it called "multiculturalism" highlights the belief in technology's ability to overcome (religious) difference. Attending to the identities remaindered by such production gives us a way of locating and describing subcultural or marginalized religions located outside pluralism's limiting frame. The essay turns from there to investigate the role of secrecy and surveillance in the state's regulation of "religion." From the A-12 warplane to SETI projects, the mutual occulting capacities of the state and the unseen religious conceal the hope invested in the impossibility of the selfhood Time presents as a cultural achievement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes the case that scholars of US religions neglect the relationships between religion and sex, or at least those that exist beyond the spheres of interdiction and, recently, the sexual activities of white evangelical Protestants. This neglect takes shape, I suggest, because of a series of unspoken and largely unquestioned presumptions about religion, sexuality, and the secular. Arguing that scholars' resistance to engaging the intersection of religion and sexual activity except among exoticised "Others" has profound consequences for queer and transgender people after well over a century of pervasive cultural associations between their identities and sex, I urge the field to adhere more closely to the principles of lived religion approaches by taking queer and transgender people at their word when they define something--even something sexual--as religious. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much research in social science concludes that uncertainty surrounding individual beliefs and identities is negative and anxiety-inducing, and that people are continuously searching for certainty. In the context of rising rates of religious disaffiliation in the United States, and the rise of social and political organizations created to promote nonreligious beliefs and values, the nonreligious offer a strategic case to explore the meaning and lived experience of certainty and uncertainty surrounding belief and identity formation. Drawing on an analysis of identity narratives from 50 nonreligious Americans, I find that uncertainty is just as often experienced as positive and motivating as it is isolating or anxiety-inducing, and although certainty-filled beliefs and identities are available for the nonreligious, they are just as often rejected for more uncertain ones. I reveal how some nonreligious individuals fluctuate between different orientations toward certainty and uncertainty regarding their nonreligion, whereas others exhibit more trait-like orientations to certainty and uncertainty. These findings have important implications for understanding how orientations to certainty and uncertainty shape identity and belief development in the modern world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the structure of religious classification in U.S. Topics discussed include contribution of Derek Lehman and Darren Sherkat on the conceptual and empirical basis for the sectarian-moderate-liberal structure for American denominational; influence of social attitudes like gender, abortion, and homosexuality and status markers like income and college degree to analyze religious classification; and views on the complications with the terminology "sect".

The article offers information on the religious identification in U.S. Topics discussed include views on the sociology of religion by providing a detailed classification of religious denominations in the United States based on a new classifying principle; information on the concept of universal salvation; and exclusivism-universalism as standard for differentiating denominations.

The article offers information on the scientific study of religion. Topics discussed include influence of evangelical on American Christians as identity label in the late 20th century; religious beliefs, identities, and devotional and participatory patterns are copied by agents of socialization through influencing family members and participation in religious worship; and views on the Bible influence over American citizens.

Almost one-third of all U.S. Americans believe that Jesus Christ will return to Earth in the next 40 years, thereby signaling the end of the world. The prevalence of this end-times theology has meant that sustainability initiatives are often met with indifference, resistance, or even hostility from a significant portion of the American population. One of the ways that the scientific community can respond to this is by making scientific discourse, particularly as related to sustainability, more palatable to end-times believers. In this paper, I apply a historical-ecological framework, which emphasizes the interdisciplinary study of landscapes to understand long-term human-environment interactions, to three millennial religious groups that formed communes in nineteenth century America. The Shakers, Inspirationalists, and Mormons all blended deep beliefs in end-times theology with agricultural practices that were arguably more sustainable than those in use in the mainstream, and their ability to reconcile eschatology with sustainability provides us with potential lessons. By examining the history, doctrines, and agroecology of these nineteenth century communes, I propose communication strategies based in autonomy, institutional support, multigenerational narratives, and anthropocentricism as potential pathways for a more productive dialogue between advocates of sustainability initiatives and end-times believers in the modern United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the deism of United States Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman. His refusal to convert to Catholicism or any of the other Christian doctrines which were dominant during nineteenth-century America; Reason why Sherman failed to belive in the religion of Jesus Christ; His beliefs in a Newtonian cosmology; The work of Michael Fellman on Sherman's beliefs.

This essay reexamines civil theology, a venerable concept in the field of political science and how it is symbolized in contemporary political practice. Civil theology provides the foundation of politics for a community and is reflected in its myths and how the community interpretes itself within the greater structure of reality. It is during periods of crises, however, when this myth structure and society's understanding of itself come into question that civil theology presents itself as a salient topic for theoretical analysis and speculation. This article considers a contemporary response to the crisis of our time, one associated with the breakdown of the “traditional” American civil theology and the impact this has had on political thought and policy debates. From an understanding of this response may come a broader knowledge of the problems confronting the policy process as well as potential resolutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the contested historiography of religion in the U.S. from the 19th century through the early 21st century, including the historiography of Catholics and Protestants in the U.S. An overview of the Presbyterian minister Robert Baird's perspective on the unification of various Protestant sects in the U.S., including in regard to Christian missions' relationship with African slaves and Native Americans, is provided.

This article employs the trinary framework to interrogate American religious freedom and religious actors' interaction with the US state. It focuses on issues of governance and the classification and management of state subjects and their activities, showing how these lived effects are entwined with more "academic" or intellectual concerns about the categories religion and superstition. The article uses "superstition" in two ways. First, it is a term many Americans, from jurists to popular writers to academics, have used to describe human activities, often with racial assumptions and implications built into the framework. Second, scholars today might use the term, as part of the trinary, as an analytical device. The argument is that because the United States guarantees religious freedom, the state (or, more specifically, a particular state agent) must classify beliefs and practices as religious. This leaves a third category of activities that are clearly not secular but are also not religious, because they are not protected. Thus, we might call this third category "superstition" or "the superstitious." The article tests this framework with two brief case studies drawn from the early and late twentieth century, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how US colonial officials understood and utilized the categories of superstition, fanaticism, and religion during the occupation of the Philippines in the early twentieth century. I adapt Jason Josephson-Storm's model of the trinary to explore the colonial politics of these categories. I focus on ideas about Filipino supernatural charms, typically referred to as anting anting. Civil administrators like ethnologist Dean Worcester and officers of the Philippine Constabulary blamed these charms for superstitious credulity and fanatical resistance against US rule. As such, beliefs, practices, and communities categorized as superstitious or fanatical were targeted strategically for reformation or elimination. I argue that ideas about superstition, religion, and fanaticism were key parts of US war and policy, often serving racial projects of governance. Pursuing this line of inquiry allows scholars to see the material stakes of the category of religion and its proximate others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Your faces bring back memories of thirty-six previous CTS convention banquets. The first was in 1979. It was held at Trinity College in Washington. I was a graduate student. Bill Cenkner was president. I'm here tonight, warts and all, where Bill stood in 1979. I think of Gerry Sloyan, Vera Chester, Dolores Greeley, Mary Lea Schneider, and the rest. To a much younger me they loomed larger than life. Tonight I want to thank you for the honor of serving briefly with them in the long line of our society's presidents. And a special thanks to my family, who made the trip to Newport to be here with us tonight. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]