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Why Religion Is Hard For Historians (and How It Can Be Easier)

Part of: The Soapbox

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2019

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History is a word for a certain kind of reasoning: reasoning about time, about human agency, and about material records that can provide information about humans as marked by time. For many scholars—not to mention many of those outside the academy—such reasoning is antithetical to the word religion. No matter how many books prove incontrovertibly that the authors of the Talmud engaged rigorously with Greek philosophy, or that Islamic philosophers contributed to the formation of modern scientific practice, or that evangelical readers engaged significantly with Biblical criticism, scholars of religion have not (and perhaps finally cannot) upend the common perception that religion is not a site of reasoned thought, but rather a space where reason is suspended. “Religion is too important to be left in the hands of people who believe in it. Finally, historians are coming to grips with this simple truth,” David A. Hollinger opined in response to reports about the flurry of scholarly interest in religion as an effect in the modern United States. It is a good quip, but one that portrays the historian as an axiomatically rationalist hero, swooping into medieval confusion in order to give clarifying accounts of the truth behind puzzling theologies, curious myths, and archaic rituals. Hollinger suggests that religious people or religious historians cannot do this work. Believers by his lights are not to be trusted with the reasoning history demands.

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The Soapbox
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Copyright © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Cambridge University Press

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History is a word for a certain kind of reasoning: reasoning about time, about human agency, and about material records that can provide information about humans as marked by time. For many scholars—not to mention many of those outside the academy—such reasoning is antithetical to the word religion. No matter how many books prove incontrovertibly that the authors of the Talmud engaged rigorously with Greek philosophy, or that Islamic philosophers contributed to the formation of modern scientific practice, or that evangelical readers engaged significantly with Biblical criticism, scholars of religion have not (and perhaps finally cannot) upend the common perception that religion is not a site of reasoned thought, but rather a space where reason is suspended.Footnote 1 “Religion is too important to be left in the hands of people who believe in it. Finally, historians are coming to grips with this simple truth,” David A. Hollinger opined in response to reports about the flurry of scholarly interest in religion as an effect in the modern United States.Footnote 2 It is a good quip, but one that portrays the historian as an axiomatically rationalist hero, swooping into medieval confusion in order to give clarifying accounts of the truth behind puzzling theologies, curious myths, and archaic rituals. Hollinger suggests that religious people or religious historians cannot do this work. Believers by his lights are not to be trusted with the reasoning history demands.

Hollinger did not invent this position. His Enlightenment forebears proposed that the historian would play a special role in the defeat of the ancien régime. Historians would explain how theologies offered as received truth were strategies of political control; historians would explain how fables of human folly were strategies of social control; and historians would explain how magical ceremonies were strategies of epistemological control. The work of historians was to explain how mobs form, fables circulate, and beliefs cement—how religions endure despite the unreason they may seem to propel. The assumption was something like: if historians offered these explanations, readers might be compelled to give up their unreasonable beliefs. Academic historical thinking emerged therefore in part as a prejudicial prescription. It existed to revoke history from religion and religious traditions of history.Footnote 3 What I am suggesting is that it is impossible to define religion as a historical subject without describing this prejudicial inference. Religion was the disease that secular history was born to heal.

Some readers of this article, self-identified historians, might not see themselves in this profile; they might point to the many excellent histories of religion written in the last many years in order to demonstrate the growing success of historians in their effort to track religion.Footnote 4 Yet we cannot move ahead (generally in our scholarly work, or specifically in this article) if we cannot agree that something still seems amiss in how historians understand religion. Even as historicizing religion is in a heyday, it is in no way exorcised of its past in which a historian's mettle was in part defined through expurgating religion.

In a 2006 issue of History and Theory, the conjoined genealogy of history and religion was taken up with great verve by several scholars who added that a third concept, modernity, was an obscuring element in their categorical engagement. As historian of medieval England David Gary Shaw wrote, “Modernity is the obstacle or prejudice that stands not just between historians and the people of the past, but also between historians and many religious people today.”Footnote 5 Reformation historian Brad Gregory argued for historians to work harder to bracket their convictions. “We must be willing to set aside our own beliefs—about the nature of reality, about human priorities, about morality—in order to try to understand them,” Gregory wrote.Footnote 6 These suppositions—about the consequences of modernity on our interpretive work, and about historians’ beliefs in the production of history—have received significant theoretical treatment elsewhere. My point is simply that Shaw's and Gregory's words indicate trouble in the historical kingdom. Even as historians agree that “modernity is the outcome of religious influence, and that modernity continues to support, and even to rely on, religion in a wide array of forms,” this does not mean they are any more comfortable with religion—its persistence or its definition—in 2019 than they were in 2006, in 1996, or 1896.Footnote 7

Finding ways to improve upon how religion appears in historical thought is the focus of this essay. In his 1954 treatise, The Nature of Prejudice, psychologist Gordon Allport wrote, “The human mind must think with the aid of categories (the term is equivalent here to generalizations). Once formed, categories are the basis for normal prejudgment. We cannot possibly avoid this process. Orderly living depends upon it.”Footnote 8 When I speak of history's prejudice about religion, Allport's humane cast on the term is what I intend: to think about how religion remains a fraught category within historical study, and also to acknowledge that prejudice is perhaps an inevitable feature of critical thought. To be clear, contemporary inheritors of Allport agree and disagree with this perspective. Psychologists believe prejudice is inherent to human socialization, but they also seek to find out if they can alter (what their work has branded) our unconscious bias.Footnote 9 In recent years, social scientists have labored to identify strategies to ameliorate such bias. Time and again, research suggests that no amount of education works. Teaching people about the history of discrimination is an ineffective way to counter discriminatory views.Footnote 10 What has worked in a small number of studies was providing volunteers with “counterstereotypical” messages. “People were shown images or words or phrases that in some way bucked the trend of what we end up seeing in our culture,” reported Mahzarin Banaji, a pioneering researcher on the origins of social cognition. “So if black and bad have been repeatedly associated in our society, then in this intervention, the opposite association was made.”Footnote 11 Re-programming the mind is, according to social scientists, more effective than educating it.

If historians accept these findings, it could lead to some despondence. What value is history, then, if it is not to educate? I wager the most hopeful labor of history, and of the humanities more generally, is not a corrective relationship to human prejudice. A corrective relationship is one in which one party, the historian, points out the factual and logical error to another party (the student, the reader, the believer). This paternalistic posture defines much of our institutional heritage, but does not define the best work written today, or our highest political and intellectual futures. Our best work exposes the power and variability of human interpretation. Within that variability, prejudice is but one form. Many historians may be eager, for example, to diminish contemporary acts of bigotry and discrimination through the provision of the histories of discrimination and stereotyping.Footnote 12 But this reach to diminish—to use history as an analgesic to racism or sexism—is a complicated intercession, suggesting that historians hold the moral high ground simply by the act of historicizing. No, a more ethically responsible—and methodologically viable—claim for history's power is in its depth of hermeneutic acuity. What do historians know that other scholars do not? They know just how richly complicated, contradictory, and varied are the ways human beings understand what they do and what they think. This capacity to complicate our contemporary senses, even our social scientific senses, is where history as a practice thrives.

When it comes to religion, historians’ valuable capacity to portray human complexity occasionally flags. A review of works that think about religion as a subject within U.S. history offers an opportunity to see where historians falter but also—through positive instantiations of the subject—how they succeed. What I discover is that historians are not, as Hollinger suggests, worried about the religious historian as much as they are overconfident in their own understanding about how religion operates, and oversimplifying of its operational power in history. Insofar as there is prejudice, it is about what religion is and how it—whatever it is—affects the lives of those who have it and speak of it.Footnote 13 To that end, I organize what follows in an exploratory tenor, asking, first, what is religion; second, what does religion do; and, third, who does religion? The answers are less prescriptive than inspiriting: let us not give up the energy religion provides historians’ pens. Let us simply be more reflective about the consequences of how we define this most inspiringly vexatious subject.

What Is Religion?

I am not the first scholar to reflect critically upon the status of religion in U.S. history. Others before have dipped into this terrain, with mixed interpretive results. In their 2010 review essay, Kevin M. Schultz and Paul Harvey suggest that the subfield devoted to the study of religion in U.S. history (what they refer to as American religious history) has completed excellent research, but to little consequence in the broader study of American history: “Despite the rise in religiosity of most Americans and contrary to the findings of religious historians that religion penetrated almost all aspects of modern American life, many—probably most—scholars outside the specific field of American religious history basically have failed to notice.” Schultz and Harvey suggest that even when works from that subfield are recognized they have no effect on “the grand narrative” of American history.Footnote 14 They then recommend a variety of ways American religious historians might “make other historians notice, and more naturally integrate American religion in American history.”Footnote 15

Schultz and Harvey build on the work of Jon Butler's earlier 2004 essay in the Journal of American History, where he advocated for “modern American history” (what he defined as U.S. history after the Civil War) as something critically formed by religious thought and practice. Butler suggested that most historians of the modern United States think of religion as something that has receded sociologically, and, as a result, they do not perceive the extent to which religion informs the development of modern social, political, and personal life. His essay traversed a wide range of subjects to show that religion is not a sidebar to modern history, but integral to it. His statement that, “In twentieth century America religion shaped not only interactions of men and women, but what it meant to be a man or a woman,” is an emblematic analytical claim in an essay that included (in addition to considerations of gender and family) examinations of religion and adolescence, religion and the politicization of race, and religion and suburbia.Footnote 16 In his essay appraising “Religious History” in American History Now (2011), John McGreevy agrees with Jon Butler that religion is determinative to modern American history, and he agrees further with Schultz and Harvey that American religious historians could do a better job to connect their research agendas with bigger items in the historiography of the United States. McGreevy is especially critical of histories of American religion that do not develop a global perspective on those religious movements. McGreevy thinks American religious history is too American.Footnote 17

Responding only to the terms of these scholars’ particular use of religion as a term of historical interest, it is tempting to wonder if each of them would agree that much of what they asked for has been accomplished—or begun to be accomplished. In response to Schultz's and Harvey's requests for scholarship that bridges American religious history and American history, one need look no further than Catherine Brekus's Sarah Osborn's World: The Rise of Evangelical Christianity in Early America (2013), Katharine Gerbner's Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (2018), and Jennifer Graber's The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West (2018). Among the many works that tackle Butler's hoped-for interaction of religion and modern American history, few are as rightly celebrated as Darren Dochuk's From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (2011) or Bethany Moreton's To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (2010). Finally, recent years have seen the publication of several excellent works tracking religion transnationally, including Adam H. Becker's Revival and Awakening: American Evangelical Missionaries in Iran and the Origins of Assyrian Nationalism (2015), Zareena Grewal's Islam Is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority (2013), Ussama Makdisi's Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (2007), and Karine V. Walther's Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821–1921 (2015). Given the terms of their critique, Butler, Harvey, Schultz, and McGreevy might find that Brekus, Dochuk et al. advanced the historiography that they arraign.

Even as I write this paragraph, however, there is a failure of nerve in my immediate acquiescence to their descriptive terms and field critique. For each of these historians (Jon Butler, Paul Harvey, John McGreevy, and Kevin Schultz), finding religion is easy. The hard thing for them is finding history that treats religion well. Considering the ease with which they assume what religion is, it is unsurprising to me that they find historical scholarship on religion wanting. For these historians, religion is an object everybody can find without much confusion. Religion stands out to them as a clearly classifiable thing. Religion is different, distinguishable, and separable from other features of culture.

That assumption of religion's difference from culture is a problematic distinction. Separating religion from other things hoists religion (and its scholarship) on its categorical petard: each of these scholars wants religion to be something easily identifiable within and distinguishable from other things in society, but they also want historians to tie it into critical, supposedly broader, movements, issues, and topics of culture. The scholarship they criticize is trapped. If a work of scholarship identifies religion as something specific, it has failed to see the broader history of which it is contingent; if that scholarship focuses on broader historical forces, then it has failed to discern the specific effects and operations of religion.

The sheer number of topics associated with “religion” in these review essays belies any clarity a scholar may want to attribute to the term. Indeed, McGreevy suggests as much when he repeatedly writes of the overabundance of the field itself: “The sheer sprawl of the field—from formal doctrine to lived experience, from Native Americans encountering Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century to evangelicals recruiting Guatemalan Christians to work at Wal-Mart—defies easy summary.” McGreevy proposes that the oversized index for religious history contributes to the lack of critical debates. “Precisely because the array of actors and goods in the religious marketplace is so vast, historians can find plenty of work without cultivating another's garden,” he writes.Footnote 18 McGreevy does not explain how he decides that “formal doctrine and lived experience” are clearly subjects for religious history, or what Native Americans encountering Jesuit missionaries have to do with religion. He takes these as obvious instances of religion. Butler gets a bit more definitional, providing a “relatively straightforward” definition of religion: “religion meaning conceptions of life and moral behavior rooted in supernatural and transcendent beliefs.” To be clear, this definition does not justify McGreevy's examples—nor, in truth, does it explicate those explored by Butler.Footnote 19 How does the historian research and then explain the relationship between lived experience and transcendent beliefs? How do they know which is rooted in which? Is it the “Native Americans” who possess conceptions of moral behavior rooted in supernatural beliefs, or is it the Jesuit missionaries?Footnote 20 And how do we (historically, religiously, intellectually) know?

I do not intend to hector.Footnote 21 I am here casting doubt that Butler and McGreevy have reflected critically enough on the term that organizes their historiographical critique. Whatever else historians do with religion, they ought to begin discussing it with a little less confidence that they know it when they see it. Even if they are disinterested in the rich theoretical conversations in the study of religion, as well as the fields of anthropology, law, and philosophy, about its classification, it would still befit critical inquiry for historians to be as transparent as possible about what they think the archive can show us about what we call religion. For example, consider the centrality of belief in Butler's definition. If supernatural and transcendent belief is a defining element of religion, how do historians know they have found it? To ask for someone's belief, or to identify someone as in possession of a belief, is something familiar in the modern United States, where survey instruments frequently seek to capture levels of religiosity through appraisals of individual testimonies to belief.Footnote 22 Americans across the religious spectrum are accustomed to these inquiries and have ready replies. (Yes, I believe in God. No, I do not believe in hell.)

For scholars of religion, such inquiries and survey instruments have the tinny, outmoded valence of a bimodal gender inquiry. The last decades of critical theorizing in religious studies demonstrate conclusively the theological and historical contingency of belief.Footnote 23 Consider the fact that not all religious traditions require or understand first-person claims to belief. Within the ritual processes of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism, the phrase “I believe” has little salience. Contemporary Jews or Buddhists may use this phrasing in non-liturgical conversation, but this is due to the “ideology of belief” (to borrow from Donald Lopez's phrasing) in which non-Christians have, in the post–Reformation West, learned to speak about their religion in a political and sociological situation where Christianity is the default interpretive reference.Footnote 24 As scholars of secularism repeatedly demonstrate, the United States is not a neutral frame of disestablishment in which religious freedom is shared equally among all sectarian parties. American religious freedom is the production of a social hierarchy in which being a certain kind of belief-speaking Christian will make taking surveys, navigating the public sphere, and winning court battles much easier than being another kind of subject.Footnote 25 Learning the language games for right legibility as an unthreatening religious other is a component of non-Christian social education in the United States.Footnote 26 “Belief appears as a universal category because of the universalist claims of the tradition in which it has become most central, Christianity,” Donald Lopez concludes. “Other religions have made universalist claims, but Christianity was allied with political power, which made it possible to transport its belief to all corners of the globe, making belief the measure of if what religion is understood to be.”Footnote 27 When historians look for belief, they collude with this political power.

With such a worry about belief on their shoulder, how else might the historian find out what religion is? Anthropological work, such as that by Thomas Csordas, Sherine Hamdy, Angie Heo, Saba Mahmood, and Nathaniel Roberts, among many others, focuses on religion in its material and linguistic manifestations.Footnote 28 Rather than decide religion is what individuals say they believe, these anthropologists use individual statements to describe socially determined frames of sensory and governmental reference. In the study of religion in U.S. history, two works that evince well these same anthropologically informed interpretive impulses are Anthony Petro's After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion (2015) and Judith Weisenfeld's New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration (2016). In After the Wrath of God, Petro plumbs the archive for what he describes as “moral languages.” Moral languages are instances where communities articulate what they understand as right behavior in terms of conduct and norms. Through this archival exhumation, Petro shows how a medical crisis—the AIDS epidemic—was also always a religious crisis, insofar as no assertion about what to do in response to the disease lacked an accompanying injunction about the morality of the social body.Footnote 29 In New World A-Coming, Weisenfeld looks at census records, embodied rituals, family structures, parade exhibitions, and building structures to prove how the “American system of racial hierarchy has structured religious belief, practices, and institutions for all people in its frame.” Weisenfeld listens to first-person claims of belief, but repeatedly maps those claims within the physical, material, and bureaucratic features of (what she calls) “religio-racial identity” that give them political and cultural salience in the United States.Footnote 30

Despite a growing number of historical works such as Petro's and Weisenfeld's, the power of belief as a category of critical historical agency endures. Sociologists incorporate questions about belief as a metric in survey instruments; cognitive scientists pursue the synaptic sources for belief; and literary scholars find analytic possibility in belief's discernment in modern fiction. Historians, too, invariably find ways to identify beliefs as primary indicators of religion in history. What real effects does this have? Let me focus on a particular work of history to demonstrate the limits of belief as a conceptual focus.

What Does Religion Do?

Of the many areas of growth in historical studies of religion, few are more dynamic than that of religion and its role in the history of capitalism.Footnote 31 Within this engaging bibliography, Jonathan Levy's Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (2012) stands out as an especially accomplished intervention. Freaks of Fortune describes the growth of corporate risk management. To document this largely nineteenth-century history, Levy narrates the emergence of actuarial practice, the rise and fall of the market in western farm mortgages, the postbellum expansion of fraternalism, and the expansion of commodity futures. He illustrates these shifts with evidence that includes Freedman's Bank balances, assets of life insurance companies, and membership rolls for U.S. fraternal societies in 1890. What unites these diverse subjects is their shared commodification of risk, the embrace of which represents a significant attitudinal shift, according to Levy. Other historians have observed the critical role insurance companies played in the development of finance capitalism.Footnote 32 Levy focuses on how risk became an acceptable way for people to understand their relationship to their economic life. How, in other words, individuals came to understand themselves as necessarily flexible and mobile in their economic decision making and willing to risk their present stability on an indeterminate future. This is a history of a concept—risk—becoming materially pertinent. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given this interest in belief and practice, Levy introduces the word “religion” early in his account of this transformation.

Or, rather, he uses the words religion, religious, and God as he explains what came before this epistemology of risk, namely an epistemology of providence. Before the nineteenth century, Levy writes, “Religious authorities counseled that in the end divine providence rule[d] over the future.”Footnote 33 As insurance and other risk management strategies became more common, nineteenth-century critics sounded a moral alarm, suggesting such hedges on future probability indicated a “sinful distrust of Providence.” In an 1846 fictional dialogue in the periodical Columbian Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine, one critic said, “To assure one's life seems to me to be wicked.”Footnote 34

Religion is the determinative prehistory to Levy's history. He explains that certain institutions, like the fourteenth-century Catholic church, thought insurance was a form of usury and argued against it. Many of those who argued in favor of risk economies did so because they understood such economies as undercutting figurations evocative of the ancien régime: of staid hierarchy and old orders. “Divine providence determined the paternalist ethos that some were masters, in charge of caring for servants, wives, children, and slaves—the religious origins of the benevolent principle, not the insurance principle.”Footnote 35 Advocates for insurance and other futures investments encouraged investors to throw off those social hierarchies in which fortune was only conceivable for a predetermined few. Risk economies were democratic—open to all who were brave enough to participate.Footnote 36 Levy suggests that this democratization of fortune coincided importantly with a period of revivals often also described in historiography as democratizing.Footnote 37 “The first life insurance advocates marshaled a new vision of the ways of providence at work in liberal Protestantism which emboldened rather than constrained free will,” he writes. “In this, they drew upon powerful religious currents running through the national religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening.” Levy draws a connection between the kind of salvation antebellum evangelicals advocated and the kind of personal responsibility these new economies demanded. “Salvation was something the sinner had to foresee, to act upon, and to become responsible for.”Footnote 38

There is muddiness here—a translucent view of social history that is as understandable as it is evasive. Understandable because in Freaks of Fortune Levy impressively tackles the simultaneity of epistemology and bureaucratization, and it is difficult to parse where one informs the other. He tries to link people's increasing capacity for risk with their diminishing investment in providential accounts of the world. In this context, is providence a belief? If it is, what is the evidence that it is something materially consequential to the actions of those to whom he can attribute it? The archive is, as Levy admirably admits, an inconstant comrade in the effort to clarify. While some preachers offer hysterical sermons about the effects of gambling, plenty of “providentialist explanations of future change persisted within nineteenth-century American economic culture.”Footnote 39 Providence is not exactly secularized (since John Rockefeller does report God got him his money), but it also is not ever specified by Levy for its religious content. Is it religious because groups of people have rituals developed to incant it? Or is it religious because it makes claims about divine authority in the lives of individuals? “Many nineteenth-century Americans continued to invoke a ‘providential hand’ guiding the centrifugal forces of their republic,” Levy writes. “But they also invoked the wheel of fortune … to describe the secular voyage of a commercial, democratic, social order, buzzing with so many uprooted and masterless people.”Footnote 40

Levy here wants to keep things loose, mirroring an archive that is not entirely coherent on providence as an ideology. I do not mind this looseness; indeed, it is one of the many features of Freaks of Fortune that makes its economic history seem so anthropologically realized: the world of these speculators is a world without simple right-angles or neat accounts. What is discomfiting is Levy's frequent return to an idea of the secular—that the ultimate journey of the risk-taking investor was a “secular voyage” in possession of what Levy refers to later as a “democratic soul”: “To assume risk, to take it, make it your own, to master it, or even just to enjoy the existential thrill of it, was a birthright of the democratic soul, a soul born in commerce.”Footnote 41 What seems too smooth here by half is the easy assumption that commerce bears souls, and that those souls are themselves secularized by their origin in commerce. As a student of religion, I do not see the secular that Levy sees. If anything, Levy's remarkable archive suggests a scrupulous effort to record and obsess about such recordings and of how to control chance despite its chanciness—to make in ritual terms an inconstant but committed set of values. I see a lot of religion in risk management. Levy sees a lot of existential sovereignty.Footnote 42

Levy interprets this as a world that is “less local and personal and more impersonal and routine,” and by saying this, he wants to contrast the sterility of actuarial charts and bureaucratized mortgages with the posited intimacy of some earlier time when economic possibility was delimited by social structures of class.Footnote 43 The souls borne by commerce are secular; those carried by providence are religious. Levy understands those to be quite different points of origin; I do not. Historians of Christianity would press Levy harder than I will on the specifics of the providence he invokes: whose idea of providence, articulated by how many, reflected in what ways among the populace? The archive largely on display in the book is not from first-person ruminations but from public acts of corporate promotion, charismatic persuasion, or allegorical fiction, all of which assume a role for calculation that is democratic and dangerous—different from the past but continuous to it. “Actuarial science provided a new technique for the financial enclosure of a ‘risk’,” Levy describes. “It was an epistemological countermovement, so to speak, against the radical uncertainties of capitalism.”Footnote 44 It is hard, given this account, and given the general vagueness of Levy's “religion,” to avoid the possible assignment of that word to this: religion here could be actuarial work itself, or the practice by which uncertainty is ameliorated through precise self-regulating activities that repeatedly reevaluate the individual's relationship to a social whole.

However, it is important to Levy that economic things are not ultimately religious things. This is nowhere more apparent than his magisterial chapter, “Fraternity in the Age of Capital,” on the fraternalism that emerged during the late nineteenth century. What is magnificent about this chapter is the level of detail Levy finds to explain and account for the heyday of fraternalism—a notoriously difficult topic to access historically.Footnote 45 Levy explains the critical role fraternal orders played in helping people navigate the social diversity of emerging financial capitalism. With elaborate entrance rituals that followed a rigorous moral assessment of potential members, fraternal orders narrowed the potential risk of economic associations. Because of the advance character profile of every member, the cohort was financially pre-approved, creating secure social frames for money-lending and the issuing of bond certificates within a context of co-liability. Historian David Hackett describes these organizations as invariably religious, but Levy writes that whatever religious impulses existed within the fraternal order would “decay or fade.”Footnote 46 Relying upon Weber's description of the transformations of sects, Levy writes:

To join an American fraternal society, Weber correctly noted, required that existing members approve of the prospective member's moral worth. In the new fraternalism not the “ethical doctrine” of the “predestination Puritans” but the “ethical conduct” of the Protestant sect persisted. The upshot was that in a secular, capitalist era men self-consciously looked directly to one another for interpersonal trust and security—not to God. The security of the social order did not filter through a religious conception of the world. Fraternal literature did make vague references to “Divine creators” and “Supreme Beings.” But with the exception of the Catholic and Jewish fraternals, most were a-religious.Footnote 47

Why is it so important for Levy to explain that these organizations were not religious? Levy suggests that the rituals conducted within fraternal societies served a social, and not a religious function, and that this is a critical difference to observe when evaluating fraternal societies. In his writings on morality and society, Émile Durkheim argued that religion defined social life. “For we know today that a religion does not necessarily imply symbols and rites, properly speaking, or temples and priests,” Durkheim explains. “The whole exterior apparatus is only the superficial part. Essentially it is nothing other than a body of collective beliefs and practices endowed with a certain authority.” Later, in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Durkheim said it most plainly: “If religion has given birth to all that is essential in society, it is because the idea of society is the soul of religion.”Footnote 48

It should be clear: to account for his use of the term, Levy does not need to agree with Durkheim's view of religion as the source of collective life. There are many theories of religion, each of which wagers a different defining center to what religion is.Footnote 49 For those who want to engage this wilderness of abstractions, there are many handbooks and companions available to the scholar unfamiliar with these materials.Footnote 50 Since it seems important to Levy that fraternal orders are a-religious, he has, by that categorical reappraisal, wandered into this exact theoretical territory. He therefore must be prepared to account for how he defines, and with what evidence he proves, what is and is not religion. Levy offers no evidence for the a-religious nature of the fraternal orders other than his insistence that they must be a-religious because they were not intimate collectivities. “For all of its reliance upon interpersonal trust, a fraternal society carried a nonprofit corporate charter,” he explains. “Fraternalism too depended on the corporate legal form.” This is the central case for his certainty about its lack of religiosity: because it is not personal, it is institutional—because it is not local, but bureaucratized. Bureaucratization, for Levy, is an inevitable feature of secularization.

The stakes of Levy's interpretation are not small. Levy has hereby arrived at a present economic world, financial world, and corporate world, that is, by his rendering, without religion. Does believing in this purported secularization of the financial industries assist our interpretative work as scholars, students, citizens, or debtors? I leave that question outstanding. It needs reply, especially for those living in the gasping wake of magical thinking that defined so many stochastic decisions. Speaking more broadly, let us simply say that Levy's decisions to reduce religion's effects are not unusual. Many other historians perceive religion as disappearing, dethroned, or dangerously spectral. Religion often appears in historical scholarship as something that is less democratic, less flexible, and less open to individual expressiveness than other things—others things such as artistic activity, progressive politics, or a risk economy. Levy in particular suggests that religion offers an inchoate but nonetheless pervasive set of beliefs, or particular belief, and this belief just happens to be the one critical for the launch of his narrative of change over time. He argues that religion is not in things where people say it is not; he suggests religion cannot be a corporate thing, even though it can be imperial in its effects. Religion is not personal, nor is it exactly governmental: it is something that once exercised social control, and only appears in modernity when groups of people seek to exert social control, or to compel people to incantations.

Such an account of religion ought to be familiar to any historically minded person. It is an idea of religion as something that once did things. It is an idea of religion that can force things. It is an idea of religion where most truly free things are not. But the best work on religion does not understand religion as something true or false. The best work on religion asks how human beings cohere, together, against all other pulls to disunity. Also, too, the best work on religion shows how disunity, violence, and pain can result from such acts of coherence.

Yet historical work often indicts such coherence as blind dumbness. This is how historians participate in a prejudicial discourse about religion, not because historians understand religion to be weak, but because they often assign to religion a specific kind of pushing, manipulating impact that history gets over through the power of rational thought, legislative action, and social hope. This is a very partial idea of religion. It is also a very delimiting notion of society.

Whose Religion?

Historians often doubt that they can join with scholars of religious studies in the work of theory.Footnote 51 Yet histories of religion always have theoretical underpinnings whether recognized or not. Take, for example, the implied concepts of religion in Kevin Kruse's One Nation under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (2015), a study of the mid-twentieth-century relationship between Christianity, corporatism, and national politics in the United States, focusing in particular on the forces that colluded to stamp certain words on our money and assure certain bromides would conclude every presidential address. Kruse concludes One Nation under God with the following paragraph:

This history reminds us that our public religion is, in large measure, an invention of the modern era. The ceremonies and symbols that breathe life into the belief that we are “one nation under God” were not, as many Americans believe, created alongside the nation itself. Their parentage stems not from the founding fathers but from an era much closer to our own, the era of our own fathers and mothers, our grandfathers and grandmothers. This fact need not diminish their importance; fresh traditions can be more powerful than older ones adhered to out of habit. Nevertheless, we do violence to our past if we treat certain phrases—“one nation under God,” “In God We Trust”—as sacred texts handed down to us from the nation's founding. Instead, we are better served if we understand these utterances for what they are: political slogans that speak not to the origins of our nation but to a specific point in its not-so-distant past. If they are to mean anything to us now, we should understand what they meant to them.Footnote 52

Kruse here wagers several theoretical ideas: religions are invented (“an invention of the modern era”); newer rituals (“fresh traditions”) can hold stronger sway over practitioners than established ones; the political (“political slogans”) and the religious (“sacred texts”) are not the same. Although Kruse asserts them as indubitable, each of these ideas is not self-evident. Each of these ideas is an argumentative assertion about the nature of religion.

I do not seek to launch a theoretical exploration. I point to Kruse in order to raise an instance of historical scholarship focusing on religion as a problematic controlling influence. The phrase “political slogans” tips Kruse's hand, revealing the extent to which he defines religion as an effect of a strategic ideology. One Nation under God models the effort to use history in order to unveil the covert political agenda of certain twentieth-century American religion. History is, therefore, not a neutral tactic for Kruse.Footnote 53 History is an interventionist effort to correct ideas about the past.

This is a position with a long and respectable lineage. Historians have shown definitively that many of the things some people think are old are actually quite new. Consider, for example, the idea of the nuclear family, or the homosexual as a social identity, or race as a classifying construct. Think further about gender equality, or notions of a free market, or the division of labor. Historians of religion would pile on further, pointing out that Hinduism is a modern concept, that Protestant leaders invented fundamentalism in the twentieth century, and that jihad only gained violent prescriptive power in late modernity. Yet despite the thoroughgoing work of historians to show these things—to show, as Kruse says, that these ideas come “from an era much closer to our own”—there are still people who believe these things are eternal. There are people who believe Hinduism existed four thousand years ago and that men have always been “men” and that America is Christian and God is eternally One.

In One Nation under God, Kruse joins that lineage, debunking any eternal associations we have with the slogans on our legal tender. Even more critical, he asserts something quite devastating about the modern American presidency, suggesting that as the military-industry complex ballooned in the wake of World War II, postwar presidents found discursive and ritual ways to expand the spiritual power of the state in the moment when corporations increasingly competed for control of its public. For many readers, such a history seems a relatively harmless affair in which Kruse shows the shallow roots of our national Christian sentiment. Yet strung throughout this account is a highly critical view of what religion is. In One Nation under God, religion is an ideological tool of powerful capitalists who are limp theological adherents. Religion is always the rationale for mistaken political action. It is never a substantive practice.

The accomplishments of Kruse's history are many. When I observe that he could have done more to make his profile of religion more dialectical and complicated, doing so would have also perhaps lessened the potential hard-hitting effect of his history. Noting that Christian ideologues, however presidential or corporate, are also in situations of vulnerability is not consonant with the sharpest edge of his political purpose. And that purpose is to show how an all white, all cisgender male Legion of Doom cast (Dwight Eisenhower, J. Walter Thompson, Billy Graham, Cecil B. DeMille, and Frank Becker) perpetuated its power by nurturing an imperial vacuum of Christian discursive control.

Who could deny this portrait, coordinating as it does with all the obvious enemies of the twenty-first century? My own interest is to understand how those enemies succeeded even as they are so easily, by historical lights, disavowed. To come to such an understanding, scholars need to develop a more capacious understanding of Christian power—one understood not as a unidirectional decree but as an antagonism of strategies.Footnote 54 There is no idea of the United States easily disassembled from an idea of Christian power. Yet how historians diagnose and describe Christianity can establish dialectical understanding of how its power continues, and also how its power is distributed and differential, not centralized and cohering. Let me offer two examples of areas in which historians have provided such rich profiles of dialectical power relations in the history of religion in the United States.

Few religious systems specifically forbid slavery, and many specifically prescribe or commemorate some form of it. In the history of the United States, discussions about slavery have always also been discussions about religion, insofar as laws about, debates over, and social rules within enslavement describe the material relations between human beings as also valued economic and moral commodities. Recent histories of Christianity and its role in slavery have worked to dig into the intimacies of slave ownership, slave proselytization, and biracial worship, showing how much of the power in white Christianity included intimate seeing of and exchanging with its enslaved subjects. In The Baptism of Early Virginia (2012), Rebecca Goetz describes how legal authorities made “Christian” overseeing mandatory as a component of labor control. “Christian servants required protection from their masters,” Goetz writes, “but African and Indian slaves required not protection but rather Christian oversight to mitigate their heathenish behavior.”Footnote 55 In The Origins of Proslavery Christianity (2008), Charles Irons describes how biracial worship became a fundamental component of evangelical identity in the Upper South. Presbyterians and Episcopalians, Irons tells us, “pursued black members … as a part of their efforts to become more evangelical.”Footnote 56 And in Christian Slavery (2019), Katharine Gerbner describes how Christianity was constantly being adjusted and redefined in response to plantation slavery and Afro-Caribbean culture. These rich scholarly works describe a world of power and negotiation, knowledge and power, and power and strategy in which every participant is in motion, reacting to new information and seeking to seize opportunity from it. Christianity is a relationship of power in which individuals confirm their identities not through its acceptance, but through its negotiated reproduction.

As Gerbner demonstrates, missions were component to the maintenance of the enslaved. Histories of missionary formation also have been especially insightful in the last many years, bringing forward the adjacency of violence and churching, educational development and Christian control, and militarism and mission. In The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs (2013), Emma Anderson uses the story of a cult surrounding seventeenth-century Jesuit martyrs to unfurl a layered account inclusive of First Nations peoples, Francophones, Anglophones, anti-Native pro-Jesuits, pro-Native anti-Jesuits, homogenizing Canadians, and historians (Catholic, Jesuit, Native, secular) alike. Anderson shows how religion continues not by the force of one of those groups, but through the creative and reactive energies of each party to one another. Missions survive through the conflict inherent to their work, not despite it. In The Gods of Indian Country (2018), Jennifer Graber offers a profile of the idea of Christian benevolence through a focus on the groups that evangelized the Kiowas in the nineteenth century. Graber demonstrates the centrality of religion to American genocide, as well as to its resistance. Religion was central to American genocide not because every Christian agreed with Indian removal—indeed, many did not—but because the work of conversion was, explicitly, cultural genocide. Alongside her rich description of missionary voices, Graber examines Kiowa calendars and Kiowa drawings to show how and why they might develop a substantive relationship to Christianity despite this overwhelming force of violence against their people. Both Graber's and Anderson's books are without spectacular supervillains or superheroes. They are committed acts of humane historicism in which everyone is a whole person, seeking legibility and power while also suffering and creating suffering. They make a who in the history of religion that is recognizable, vulnerable, and variegated.

Beyond Prejudice

Several years ago, I wrote to colleagues who work in the study of religion in the United States and asked them to complete a short poll in which they named, first, their favorite book addressing religion in American history published during the previous ten years and, second, the book they deemed the most significant. Of the eighty-five replies that I received, there were many examining the meaning of “significant.” Despite this useful parsing, there was overlap in the answers. In addition to two works I have already mentioned (Darren Dochuk's From Bible Belt to Sunbelt and Bethany Moreton's To Serve God and Wal-Mart), Robert Orsi's Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (2005) and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan's The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (2005) received the most votes, indicating that they were books people both enjoyed personally but also recognized as serious contributions to the historical study of religion in the United States.Footnote 57 The success of those two volumes indicates a widespread desire for interventions into the complicated morass of definitional decision-making and historical equivocating about the role of religion in historical transformation. In Between Heaven and Earth, Orsi, an accomplished ethnographer and historian of American Catholicism, offers a series of detailed views of particular moments of intimate hermeneutics. Using his relationships with family members, and their particular struggles with institutions, embodiment, and sociality, Orsi decides that the word religion is primarily a category denoting a relationship, or multiple relationships, that occur in complicated fields of power. Orsi refuses the dichotomy between objectivity and subjectivity, suggesting that a scholarly person (like a political person or a military person) is always negotiating multiple perspectives toward him/herself and his/her world. “How can historians and scholars of culture talk about the realness of presence within particular social worlds at particular times but always within the limits of our modern disciplines?” Orsi asks. “And how does serious engagement with the cultural realities of presence allow us to push against the limits of modern scholarship in religion?”Footnote 58

Sullivan's The Impossibility of Religious Freedom is quite different from Orsi's book in tone, evidence, and emphasis, yet she shares with Orsi an interest in the ways that religion is a subject produced through certain relationships of power. In her case, religion emerges through jurisprudence. The book describes a particular trial in which plaintiffs asked the court to prevent the city from replacing their chosen graveyard memorials (including sacred hearts and stars of David) with flat grave markers, as required by the terms of their burial contracts. What is interesting about the case is that the group of plaintiffs included people from a variety of sects making a common claim that the city had impinged upon their free exercise of religion. Nevertheless, the judge in the case had a hard time seeing the religion, and it is the process of discernment, occurring between these two parties, that supplies Sullivan's documentary archive and argumentative title. The judge could not see the religion in these grave memorials because no religious institution required these grave memorials. The memorials were meaningful to the family members as representations they, as families, voluntarily used to demarcate their social identity in commemorative stone. The judge, functioning from what Sullivan refers to as an “evangelical epistemology” common throughout the judicial system, could not recognize the material expressions on those gravestones. “Religion—‘true’ religion some would say—on this modern protestant reading, came to be understood as being private, voluntary, individual, textual, and believed. Public, coercive, communal, oral, and enacted religion, on the other hand, was seen to be ‘false,’” Sullivan explains.Footnote 59

Orsi and Sullivan do not just tell us to look at religion differently, but to think about religion differently: to think of religion not as a thing that can be found, named, adjudicated, and studied, but instead think of religion as a dialectical process by which distinctions are named, sociality is explained, and relationship to power (natural and supernatural) is managed.Footnote 60

Tackling religion as a subject of historical inquiry is difficult for some of the same reasons tackling race and gender is so challenging: because the tools we use to study these subjects are the very same tools that have comprised their formulation as hierarchical distinctions between human beings. Being a scholar does not make you a person who can easily rescue anyone from bad thinking. The archive of scholarly activity includes as many specious acts of classification as it does impositions of righteous hermeneutic justice. What being scholars affords us is the opportunity to slow down the processes by which we decide our evidence and we process our interpretations. Scholarship presses us not to rely on precedent, but to undo the seams of thought and to ask ourselves how we know what we claim to know.

In the 1950s, the pioneering photojournalist Eve Arnold took many photographs of Marilyn Monroe. Most of the photographs capture Monroe as she lingers strongest in cultural memory: bikini clad, or lolling naked wrapped in satin sheets on a bed, or staring mysteriously from a leaning posture in a cocktail dress. One photograph stands out in the series. In 1955, Arnold photographed Monroe reading a worn copy of James Joyce's Ulysses. It is still debated whether this was simply an attempt to recast Monroe's image from the dotty blonde she often played on-camera, or whether it reflected an intellectual curiosity not normally—and not easily—captured by photography.Footnote 61 I am here seeking to draw on the iconicity of Monroe to think about the alerting, affecting iconicity of religion. At the outset of this essay, I mentioned social scientific research on counterstereotyping—research that has explored the effect of certain television programs (such as The Cosby Show) on changing attitudes toward discriminated minorities.Footnote 62 The photograph of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses tells us much in the surprise it elicits: it tells us what the viewer thinks is possible, and what the viewer imagines is improbable. Whether or not a scholar possesses a sectarian identity—whether or not someone has read Ulysses—our obligation is to account for the effect our suppositions about self, mind, sociality, and claims of the supernatural have on our interpretations. We do this for ourselves, absolutely. But more critically, we must do this within the archives of our historical exploration. The practice of the former has been described as scholarly reflexivity. The latter is critique.

Historians are not wrong that religion has manifold effects on the universe, but too often they do not see how their production of a cure—their production of historicism—is dependent upon the existence of an illness to heal. Every time a graduate mentor advises students to seek the stakes of their project in a historiographical problem, they bequeath this attitudinal and habitual pattern. To be clear: the problem is not problems. It is our lack of self-awareness that we—not the archive, not the historiography, not the students or our colleagues—are the origin of any problem we set. Insofar as historical work pursues the chronology of certain perceptions or prejudices, it—we, as authors of it—have the obligation to account for our relationship to these perceptions. This is the hardest work imaginable. It cannot be done with a confession of identity, or a glancing remark about the locatedness of the author. It can only be done through a tough reckoning with ourselves as interpretive actors, especially as we search, select, and storify materials in an effort to explain what we decided—through the very pursuit of an account—was not yet well explained in the annals of interpretation. As we begin to ask from whence our questions come—why this subject not that one, why this confusion not that one—we will see how strongly our ideas of reason, and the reasonable, affect the subjects we make through our work. And we may find, more often than not, that these ideas—often spectral, always relational—are tied to the social formation known as religion.

Kathryn Lofton is professor of American studies, religious studies, history, and divinity at Yale University. She is the author of two books, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (2011) and Consuming Religion (2017), and one co-edited (with Laurie Maffly-Kipp) collection, Women's Work: An Anthology of African-American Women's Historical Writings (2010).

Footnotes

I am deeply grateful to Brooke Blower for her intelligent and incisive editorial engagement, not to mention offering a soapbox on which I could stand. During the five-year gestation of this piece, I received thoughtful feedback from Steve Andrews, Ed Linenthal, and Matthew Specter. Through the 2014 poll that informed my early thinking on these subjects, I corresponded with many colleagues. I thank the eighty-five respondents to that Google survey for their replies, and I thank Christopher Allison, Chip Callahan, Chris Cantwell, Matthew J. Cressler, Edward E. Curtis IV, Janine Giordano Drake, Kate Carté, Paul Harvey, Matthew Hedstrom, Laurie Maffly-Kipp, John Lardas Modern, Robert Orsi, Sally Promey, Leigh Schmidt, Chad Seales, Skip Stout, Daniel Vaca, and Tisa Wenger for their additional exchanges. Nancy Levene and Caleb Smith offered sentence-level readings that rescued me from much more than errors of grammar.

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44 Ibid., 80.

45 On the history of freemasons, see Brooks, Joanna, “Prince Hall, Freemasonry, and Genealogy,” African American Review 34, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 197216CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Carnes, Mark C., Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven, CT, 1991)Google Scholar; Clawson, Mary Ann, Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism (Princeton, NJ, 2014)Google Scholar; Hackett, David G., That Religion in Which All Men Agree: Freemasonry in American Culture (Berkeley, CA, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Williams, Loretta J., Black Freemasonry and Middle-Class Realities (Columbia, MO, 1980)Google Scholar; and Maffly-Kipp, Laurie, Setting Down the Sacred Past: African-American Race Histories (Cambridge, MA, 2010), 1664Google Scholar.

46 Hackett, That Religion in Which All Men Agree.

47 Levy, Freaks of Fortune, 203–4. Levy relies on Weber, Max's essay, “The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism” (1904), in Gerth, H. H. and Mills, C. Wright, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York, 1979), 302322Google Scholar.

48 Durkheim, Émile, “Individualism and the Intellectuals,” in Bellah, Robert, ed., On Morality and Society (Chicago, 1973), 4357Google Scholar, here 51; Durkheim, Émile, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life: A Study in Religious Sociology (London, 1915), 419Google Scholar.

49 The most popular undergraduate text offering an account of such theories is Pals, Daniel, Nine Theories of Religion (New York, 2014)Google Scholar. A more inclusive introductory work on theories of religion is Meredith Minister and Bloesch, Sarah J., eds. Bloomsbury Reader in Cultural Approaches to the Study of Religion (London, 2018)Google Scholar.

50 Connolly, Peter, ed., Approaches to the Study of Religion (London, 2002)Google Scholar; Martin, Craig, A Critical Introduction to the Study of Religion (New York, 2014)Google Scholar; McCutcheon, Russell T., Studying Religion: An Introduction (New York, 2007)Google Scholar; Orsi, Robert A., ed., The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies (Cambridge UK, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rodrigues, Hillary and Harding, John S., Introduction to the Study of Religion (Abingdon, UK, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stausberg, Michael and Engler, Steven, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in the Study of Religion (Abingdon, UK, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Taylor, Mark, ed., Critical Terms for Religious Studies (Chicago, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 For a paradigmatic expression of this perspective, see Butler, Jon, “Theory and God in Gotham,” History and Theory 45, no. 4 (Dec. 2006): 4761CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52 Kruse, Kevin M., One Nation under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (New York, 2015), 294Google Scholar.

53 This point is aptly illustrated by his Twitter personae, as described in Emma Pettit, “How Kevin Kruse Became History's Attack Dog,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (Dec. 16, 2018), https://www.chronicle.com/article/How-Kevin-Kruse-Became/245321 (accessed Mar. 9, 2019).

54 Work that engages this approach has a strong (if unstated) debt to Michel Foucault's conceptualization of power. For a starting point, see Foucault, Michael, “The Subject and Power,” in Dreyfus, Hubert and Rabinow, Paul, eds., Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, 1983), 208–26Google Scholar.

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56 Irons, Charles F., The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill, NC, 2008), 102Google Scholar.

57 Besides the four volumes that received the most votes overall in that 2014 survey, these books received more than two votes as the most significant work from the last ten years: Albanese, Catherine L., A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven, CT, 2007)Google Scholar; Bivins, Jason C., Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism (New York, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Evans, Curtis J., The Burden of Black Religion (New York, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fessenden, Culture and Redemption; Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America; and Wenger, We Have a Religion.

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59 Sullivan, Winnifred Fallers, The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (Princeton, NJ, 2005), 8Google Scholar.

60 In recent years, another work, Johnson's, Sylvester A.African American Religions, 1500–2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom (Cambridge, UK, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, has joined Orsi's and Sullivan's work as a major contribution to this field referred to as the cultural history of the study of religion.

61 Monroe's personal library, catalogued at the time of her death, suggests the latter, although the possession of books does not automatically convey the way in which they were read and possessed. To view the listing of the volumes in Monroe's estate, consult http://www.librarything.com/catalog/marilynmonroelibrary (accessed Mar. 9, 2019).

62 For an indicative act of scholarship, see Klein, Diane J., “Latino Masculinities Under the Microscope: Stereotyping and Counterstereotyping on Five Seasons of CSI: Miami,” FIU Law Review 3, no. 2 (2008): 395421CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Havens, Timothy, “‘The Biggest Show in the World’: Race and the Global Popularity of The Cosby Show,” Media, Culture & Society 22, no. 4 (July 2000): 371–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Matabane, Paula Whatley and Merritt, Bishetta D., “Media Use, Gender, and African American College Attendance: The Cosby Effect,” Howard Journal of Communications 25, no. 4 (2014): 452–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.