This essay analyzes blogs, sermons, videos, and published interviews to examine the religious rhetoric of Christian practitioners of mixed martial arts as well as pastors who promote or reference the sport in their sermons. In the tradition of muscular Christianity (the Bible-based manhood movement of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries), these fighters and pastors argue that MMA teaches Christian virtues such as discipline and self-control. Linking a healthy physical body with a healthy mind and spirit, they suggest that athletes enact and embody Christian values and ideals of manliness. Some scholars (such as Tony Ladd and James Mathisen) have argued that modern incarnations of muscular Christianity preach a mere “folk theology”—that is, essentially a locker-room pep talk with a touch of Jesus thrown in. Drawing on the field of lived religion, however, I argue that practitioners of Christian MMA experience a close connection between the sport and their religious beliefs. Though the theology may take the language of the “folk,” certain values (discipline and self-sacrifice), theological positions (premillennialism, life as a struggle, Jesus as the focus of religion), and social agendas (addressing masculine aggression and religious and cultural effeminacy) characterize both turn-of-the-century muscular Christianity and Christian MMA today. Athletes strive to imitate Christ and embody Christian values—aided, perhaps, by the bodily practice of their sport. Their focus on Jesus at the expense of doctrine does not indicate a lack of theology. Rather, the image of a manly Christ who will not give up represents a strong, assertive, masculine ideal that fits clearly into an evangelical worldview.

In 1869, President Ulysses S. Grant initiated the “Peace Policy” with American Indians, an approach that privileged humane interactions with native peoples and allowed religious groups to run reservations across the American West. The Society of Friends, or Quakers, administered the largest number of reservations and symbolized the policy's benevolent aims. This essay explores varying Quaker understandings of peaceful relations with Indians as well as the general public's perception of the Friends' nonviolence. The essay focuses on an 1871 Indian attack on an overland wagon train, including Quaker engagements with the army in the attack's aftermath. Despite the Society's part in an emerging culture of threat against Plains Indians, Americans continued to consider both the Society and the policy to be peaceful. As such, this episode proves useful for understanding the intersections of religion and violence in United States history. Close analysis of the internal Quaker debate about military engagement, as well as Americans' ongoing identification of the policy with nonviolence, shows how religious groups and religious language were employed to reclassify episodes of violence as peace.

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

This article explores arguments among medico-legal experts (including Amariah Brigham, Isaac Ray, John P. Gray, and W. A. Hammond) about the social and moral ramifications of expanding the definition of insanity to include moral insanity. This is an important corrective to a standard view that sees the movement to transform the insanity defense in nineteenth-century America as a rejection of the explanatory power of human depravity in the face of an optimistic understanding of human nature as found in Scottish common sense philosophy. The debate, especially between Ray and Brigham, on the one hand, and Gray, on the other, finally led to a situation in which religious discussions of sin, the will, grace, and the shape of the human self were legally sidelined.

In the years after 1965, a new wave of Asian, Latino, Caribbean, and African immigrants has transformed and revitalized the religious landscape of many U.S. cities. This essay explores the transformation of Christianity in greater Boston, where new immigrants replenished ailing congregations and infused them with new religious and social practices. This de-Europeanization of Christianity was not simply a result of transnational practices but resulted from a collaborative process between immigrants and native-born religious institutions. Both Catholic and Protestant churches experienced this immigrant-based revitalization, but evangelical Protestants have been particularly adept at partnering with newcomers to promote a “quiet revival” of urban Christianity.

This article describes the fluidity of evangelical gender ideology during the 1970s and posits that belief in male headship became one of the distinct marks of evangelical identity in the late 1970s and early 1980s. At that time, the Christian Right led a campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment, arguing that the ERA was the means by which feminists were seeking to destroy the family. It became politically expedient for evangelicals to assert their support for male headship over and against a feminist paradigm of the family. In the 1990s and 2000s, as evangelicals had begun to feel less animosity towards feminism and had actually absorbed many feminist assumptions, the Christian Right's campaign against gay marriage gave evangelicals a new reason to cling to the ideology of male headship. The campaigns against the ERA and gay marriage have made evangelicals aware of the very real presence of different models of family in American society. This awareness has enhanced commitment to the headship model of marriage.

Historians Betty DeBerg and Margaret Bendroth have done much to point historians to the way in which gender ideology has been important to evangelical identity over the last century. By analyzing anti-ERA and anti-gay marriage evangelical literature, this article argues that gender ideology was integral to the formation of evangelical identity during the last third of the twentieth century. Thus, the article seeks to extend the argument of DeBerg and Bendroth into the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s and to present gender ideology as a key feature in defining twentieth-century American evangelicalism.

During the 1930s and 1940s, the Great Depression and the rise of communism and fascism in Europe convinced a broad spectrum of Americans that they were living through a prolonged “crisis of civilization” with real potential to destroy all they held dear. Meanwhile, they saw evidence that these global problems put young people especially at risk for immorality, loss of hope, and political subversion. Because the “youth problem” and the “world crisis” seemed to be inextricably linked, even the everyday behaviors of young people took on a heightened political significance in the eyes of many adults. Christian leaders from across the spectrum of churches—Mainline Protestant, Evangelical, Roman Catholic, and African American—did not just capitalize on this obsession with youth and the fate of civilization; they did all they could to fan those flames. They did so not cynically, but sincerely, believing that they could and should save the world by saving American youth. Yet these leaders were also making a bid for influence in American society and for control of the future of their churches. The resulting politicized views of youth and youth work would not only influence the outcomes of internal church battles, but they would also shape how various Christian groups responded to the Cold War.