Empires are a very hot issue in historical scholarship right now, and missions and missionaries are an important part of the subject. That goes far beyond a crude stereotype of the missionary as a cynical servant of empire, preparing the way for conquest and exploitation. The relationship between missions and empire is complex, and especially so in an American context. That is one theme I am discussing right how in the book I am presently writing on Religion and American... Read more
The 1991 Christmas standard “Mary Did You Know” was an oft-repeated anthem for many of us over past Christmas seasons. With its repeated titular question, the song is one of a relative few modern songs to focus on the perspective of Mary in the Christmas story. Its emphasis, however, is characteristically Protestant: not on Mary as the mother of God or as a key part of the Christmas story, but on Mary as a figure observing the Christmas story unfolding... Read more
During the 1980s, Central America was the setting for brutal revolutions and civil wars that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. The United States was closely involved in all these struggles, and I have argued that they must be seen in the long-term context of American empire and quasi-empire: they were America’s Late Imperial Wars. As in another such contexts through imperial history, such wars had profound consequences for the homeland. To adapt a famous phrase, what happens on the... Read more
Just weeks after the 2024 election, I discussed Kristin Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne with my graduate seminar on “Women, Gender, and Sex in American Religious History”—for the third time. Each time was an election year. I taught the book shortly after its release in 2020, then again in 2022, and now again in 2024. I was curious what might ring differently after Trump’s reelection. (I am not the only Bencher whose mind went in this direction recently! Check... Read more
A Review of Jerome E. Copulsky’s American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order (Yale University Press, 2024) A professed respect for the American Constitution is one of the few things that unites Americans on both the left and the right in these polarized times. Indeed, it has been an article of faith throughout the nation’s history. But Jerome Copulsky’s American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order focuses on the Americans who dared to dissent from this creed because of their... Read more
Over the past decade, an interest in the transpacific has transformed scholarship on American Christianity. As Helen Jin Kim argued in Race for Revival: How Cold War South Korea Shaped the American Evangelical Empire, “it simply is not possible to understand evangelicalism without looking at transnational linkages and movement across the Pacific, especially when we move into the twentieth century.” Justin Tse, a religion scholar and geographer at Singapore Management University, offers one of the most exciting contributions to... Read more
*Note: This post has been slightly updated and expanded by the author for clarity. It goes without saying: Donald Trump ignited nothing less than a wholesale historiographical and sociological reckoning with American evangelicalism. Books like Jemar Tisby’s The Color of Compromise, Sam Perry and Andrew Whitehead’s Taking America Back for God, Robert P. Jones’s White Too Long, Anthea Butler’s White Evangelical Racism, John Fea’s Believe Me, Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, and Kristin Du Mez’s... Read more
My current work concerns the relationship between empires and the making and development of religion. Some of that connection is obvious – think of Christianity growing within the matrix of the Roman Empire, and then spreading worldwide through the missionary work of other later empires. But there are many other forms of influence and impact, and today I will talk about some other very modern patterns that occurred within an American imperial framework. Specifically, I will address the imperial dimensions... Read more
In my first semester of grad school, I took a Latin reading seminar. Surprisingly, we were assigned the Vulgate translation of the Song of Songs to read aloud and translate as a group—not something I would suggest! Let’s just say it led to some awkward moments. Fortunately, my second semester had fewer episodes of embarrassment, but the assigned text held my attention no less. It was a travel account from a fourth-century woman, recounting her steps as she wandered about... Read more
This column is adapted from my introductory remarks on “The Risk of Social Media Engagement for Historians”, which I gave for a roundtable discussion at the recent Biennial Professional Conference for the Conference on Faith and History. This panel was sponsored by the Anxious Bench, chaired by our previous editor Chris Gehrz, and it included expert contributions from fellow panelists and colleagues, Andrea Turpin and David Swartz. I joined Facebook in 2006, Twitter in 2009, and Instagram in 2012. Each... Read more
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