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Noble Drew Ali, leader of the Moorish Science Temple of America movement in the early twentieth-century, taught that "citizenship is salvation." This book examines the legacy of Ali's thoughts on citizenship, law, and race in the MSTA and two other Aliite religions, the Washitaw de Dugdahmoundyah and the Nuwaubian Yamassee movement. In all three African American religious movements, members insist on an identity other than "negro, black, or colored" as a way of insisting upon full citizenship as a status. Thinkers within these religions also reiterate Ali's claims about citizenship as a process, a work of "sacred duty" wherein, through activity ranging from voting to pro se legal performance, citizens contribute to the perfection of the world. Such claims not only respond to American racism in creative ways, they also advance an understanding of "law" as an eternal, metaphysical reality, divine, aligned with justice and truth. The work of citizenship, then, is aimed at aligning the unjust and oppressive legal system of the state with that of True Law.

Beheading the Saint analyzes the genesis and transformation of national identity in Québec from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, with specific attention to the secularization of French Canadianness during the 1960s’ Quiet Revolution. Zubrzycki does so by tracing the symbolic career of St. John the Baptist, the national patron saint, in processions, parades and protests, which, she argues, contributed to the articulation of a new, secular Quebecois identity. She extends her analysis of nationalism, religion and secularism in Québec by examining recent debates on immigration, the reasonable accommodation of religious minorities’ practices, and the place of religious symbols in the public sphere.

Through readings of the opinions of the US Supreme Court and other legal texts, this book shows how “the church” as a religious collective is granted special privilege in US law. In-depth analyses of Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby reveal that the law tends to honor the religious rights of the group—whether in the form of a church, as in Hosanna-Tabor, or in corporate form, as in Hobby Lobby—over the rights of the individual, offering corporate religious entities an autonomy denied to their respective members. In discussing the various communities that construct the “church-shaped space” in American law, this book also considers disputes over church property, the legal exploitation of the black church in the criminal justice system, and the recent case of Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. Church State Corporation challenges basic beliefs about the ties between religion and law in ostensibly secular democracies.

Dæmons Are Forever is both a record of archaic contacts and transactions between humans and protean spirit beings (dæmons) and an account of exchanges, among human populations, of the science of spirit beings: dæmon-ology. Since the time of the Indo-European migrations, and especially following the opening of the overland and maritime trade and invasion routes known as the “Silk Road,” a common dæmon-ological vernacular has been shared among populations ranging from East and South Asia to Northern Europe. Unbound by exclusivist theological and institutional strictures, dæmons (some of them malign and properly demonic, and many of them feminine) have always traveled more lightly than the high gods of official religions, leaving their traces behind in a rich and varied corpus of myths, folk and fairy tales, works of art and fiction, ritual and scientific treatises, material artefacts, and accounts left by itinerants and immigrants, traders and invaders, demonologists and anthropologists. Through a set of five studies retracing Indo-European and Silk Road histories of changeling traditions, the evil eye, mirror divination, shape-shifting demons and fairies, and demonological technologies, the book explores the spread and transformations of a complex body of millennial dæmon-ological myths, rituals, and images. Methodologically, the author proposes that a “connected histories” approach to Eurasian dæmon-ology may serve as a model for situating history in its proper place, at the heart of the History of Religions discipline.

Days of Awe examines the stories of the American-Jewish Palestine solidarity movement and Jewish critics of the occupation. Atalia Omer demonstrates that critical resistance to the Israeli occupation of Palestinians enables American Jews to reimagine Jewishness from feminist, gender non-conformist, non-white and other Jewish margins. Through the search for solidarity with Palestinians these activists interrogate privilege, grapple with their complicity, and participate in a broader social movement that intersects multiple sites of struggle for liberation. The book illuminates how narratives about identity and conflict can provide sites for resistance and peacebuilding that enable reimagining religious tradition. It examines the multidirectional interrelations between innovation in religious identity and tradition and social protest. Based on extensive participant observation fieldwork and interviews, the book captures how reimagining identity from the grassroots and the margins involves feedback loops between the experiences of ethical outrage and unlearning ideological formations, neither of which is instinctive but rather reflect complex sociological mechanisms and processes often not examined in scholarship on religion and social change. These sociological processes generative of moral shocks also necessitate engaging with and innovating with tradition, histories, memories, and embodied experiences such as those of Mizrahi, Sephardi and Jews of Color. Days of Awe, therefore, employs the resources of religious studies in conversation with social movement theory to develop a more sociologically robust analysis of religion and change.

American Christians value the feeling of emptiness and seek to cultivate it, believing that the more profoundly they experience emptiness the greater their longing for God and the nearer they draw to their goal of feeling spiritually filled by God. Emptiness must precede fullness. Americans practice bodily disciplines as a way of representing, prompting, and intensifying their feelings of emptiness. They cognize and cultivate the feeling of emptiness through fasting, bloodletting, silence, labor, and other activities undertaken as forms of self-denial. Americans feel the emptiness of time and space. They conceive of the geographic space of America as empty, and in their making of place they play with complex representations of emptiness and fullness. Americans imagine the emptiness of earthly time in contrast to the fullness of eternity, often complicating that understanding by asserting that empty, earthly time is empty precisely because it is filled with corruption. They are keenly aware of the dangers of empty words, empty doctrines, and empty beliefs, and are on constant guard against them. The energetic pursuit of the feeling of emptiness, the radical denial of self, places individuals and groups in challenging circumstances as they attempt to create and maintain identities. Americans build Christian ingroup identity by asserting what they are not, by pushing off from other groups whom they identify as competitors in the religious marketplace. Disestablishment fosters such competition among groups by providing a social setting in which numerous foils can be identified and group identity constructed via negativa.

Americans occupying Japan at the close of World War II claimed to be bringing religious freedom to a country where it did not exist. They described Japan’s 1889 constitutional guarantee of religious freedom as false, and they claimed to be implanting “real religious freedom” in its stead. But in making such claims, the occupiers overlooked inconvenient historical facts. This book shows that Japanese people were involved in a robust debate about religious liberty for decades before the occupation began, and it demonstrates that the American occupiers were far less certain about how to define and protect religious freedom than their triumphalist rhetoric suggested. Moreover, whereas post-occupation histories have assumed that the occupiers introduced the human right of religious freedom to Japan, Faking Liberties argues that the inherently transnational circumstances of military occupation prompted a new conception of religious-freedom-as-human-right: timeless, universal, and innate. During the Occupation, the occupiers and their Japanese counterparts collaboratively constructed a new technical vocabulary about “good” and “bad” religion. Categories they developed such as "new religions" and "State Shintō" still dictate how academics, journalists, and policy makers today imagine who deserves religious freedom, which political practices infringe on religious liberty, and who bears responsibility for doing anything about it.

This book tells the story of how American Catholics became vocal champions of conscience rights and subjective freedoms in the 1960s and 1970s. Catholics, particularly priests, defended the rights of doctors and nurses to follow conscience and opt out of abortion procedures throughout the 1970s. Before that, however, Catholic antiwar activists came to the aid of men drafted into the military who wanted to follow conscience rather than fight in the Vietnam War. At the same time as Catholics protested the Selective Service, priests began defending the freedom of the laity to follow conscience on the question of contraception. American historians often depict Protestant dissidents and secular rebels as the nation’s champions of individualism. But in the late twentieth-century, as this book contends, Catholics joined America’s long-running discourse on individualism, shaping its basic terms. The Catholic campaign for conscience rights deepened and transformed the nation’s concept of autonomy and, with it, the broader culture of modern American democracy. The Catholic campaign for conscience rights shaped broader American concepts of ecumenism, individualism, freedom, democracy, autonomy, and pluralism. However, Follow Your Conscience does not tell a story of progress, but one of antagonism and intellectual gridlock. A significant legacy of the Catholic conscience rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s is a constantly churning cycle of theological and political argumentation, in the United States and in the Vatican, with no end in sight.

How do people practice religion in their everyday lives? How do our daily encounters with people who hold different religious beliefs shape the way we understand our own moral and spiritual selves? This book takes a highly original approach to answering these questions. For more than a year the author of this book worked in New York City as a volunteer for a nonprofit, nonreligious organization called God's Love We Deliver, helping to prepare home-cooked meals for people with AIDS. Paying close attention to what was said and not said, the author traces how the volunteers gave voice to their moral positions and religious values. This book also examines how they invested their conversations, and mundane activities such as cooking, with personal meaning that in turn affected how they saw their own spiritual lives.

Holy Nation reconstructs the transnational religious community forged by the Society of Friends during the Age of Revolution. It utilizes the public and private writings of 76 ministers (40 male and 36 female) who crossed the Atlantic Ocean from 1750–1820 in order to reinforce religious ties across national borders. It argues that these Quakers envisioned themselves as the ancient Hebraic nation of Zion in order to articulate an identity not only separate from but in opposition to the nation-state during this critical period. This positionality, however, represented a triple threat to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century governments. First, Friends' primary political identity was invested not in the nation or the empire but rather in a loose, transatlantic alliance of Society members, undermining the idea of a cohesive citizenry. Second, Quakers were united in their opposition to the practices used by those in power to secure and exert their authority, challenging exclusionary definitions of citizenship. Finally, Friends' activism underscored the distance between the promise of democracy and the practices that violated it, highlighting the oppressive power of the state. In these three ways, the Friends' holy nation challenges the common supposition that religion and nationalism were mutually constitutive during this period, highlighting instead the role of religion in questioning the form and character of the nation-state. Holy Nation thus intervenes in religious and Atlantic World historiography, demonstrating how religious identity subverted the project of nation-building by offering concrete alternative definitions of nation and citizen at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Western society has never been more interested in interiority. Indeed, it seems more and more people are deliberately looking inward—toward the mind, the body, or both. Inward focuses on one increasingly popular channel for the introverted gaze: vipassana meditation, a Buddhist meditation of mindfulness that was revitalized and adapted for a secular audience. Based on a rich ethnographic account, Inward unravels the social dynamics that lie at the heart of meditation practice while simultaneously supplying a sociological framework for the study of the place of the human body in the enduring process of self-awareness. The book tracks the westward diffusion of meditation, enters the silent meditation retreats where people experience solitude in the presence of others, and follows practitioners’ interactions at work and home, as well as their relations with their significant others. It uncovers the multiple ways practitioners use the meditative focus on the inner-lining of embodied experience as a way to transcend the shocks and splits to the self that occur as they move between social relations and identities. At the close of this ethnographic journey, the reader will see how through communities, routines, and rituals, individuals turn their attention inward without stepping out of society, experience solitude without being isolated, and negotiate the tensions engendered by contemporary social life.

Kindred Spirits explores a little-known, remarkable network of Catholic historians, theologians, poets, and activists who pushed against both the far-right surge in interwar Europe and the secularizing tendencies of the leftist movements active in the early to mid-twentieth century. With attention to the complexity of real lives, this book argues that this group sought a middle way anchored in “spiritual friendship”—religiously meaningful friendship understood as uniquely capable of facing social and political challenges. For this group, spiritual friendship was inseparable from resistance to European xenophobia and nationalism, anti-racist activism in the United States, and solidarity with Muslims during the Algerian War. Friendship, they believed, was a key to both divine and human realms, a means of accessing the transcendent while also engaging with our social and political existence. Some of the figures are still well known—philosopher Jacques Maritain, Nobel Prize laureate Gabriela Mistral, influential Islamicist Louis Massignon, poet of the Harlem renaissance Claude McKay—while others have unjustly faded from memory. Attentive to the complexities and afterlives of this community, Kindred Spirits is an exploration of both the beauty and flaws of a vibrant social network worth remembering.

Secularization has changed how Americans see their cultural landscape. This book explains why by examining the language and lived experience of legal conflict over sacred space since the 1970s. From high-profile fights over wilderness areas to small-town spats over schoolhouse nativity scenes, battles across the religious-secular divide have produced a new geography of religion, one in which the very idea of sacred space is continually both called into question and restrictively defined. In this climate of religious ambivalence, law has played an ever-greater role in shaping how Americans experience and imagine their material environment, especially in the public realm. Public space has not only become a constitutional battleground; it has become engine for producing forms of secular legal consciousness that are strangely new and yet deeply rooted in Protestant culture. Through case studies in a diverse range of cultural and geographic settings, this book shows how increasing religious diversity, the rise of the Christian Right, environmental politics, and the growth of seeker spirituality have helped drive this trend. For the activists, legal experts, and ordinary citizens profiled in this book, secularity is both an intellectual abstraction and an embodied condition, engrained in the intimate politics of religious belonging.

For many of their contemporaries, the nineteenth-century Mormons were the victims of a peculiar kind of zealotry: theirs was the story of a population deranged--socially, sexually, even racially--by the extravagances of belief they chose to name “religion.” This book offers a counterhistory of early Mormonism, tracking the Latter-day Saints from the period of their emergence as a dissident sect, fired by a heterodox and scandalizing carnal imagination, through to their renunciation of polygamy at century’s end. Over these unruly decades, the Mormons would appear by turns as heretics, sex-radicals, “Mohammedan” tyrants, refugees, colonizers, and, eventually, as reluctant monogamists, enfranchised at last into the secular nation and its empire of white settlers. Reading Mormonism across these registers, the book fashions a synthesizing critical idiom that uses religious history, Native Studies, political theology, and queer critique to tell a new story about secularism as a regulatory, disciplinary, and racializing metaphysics: about, that is, the biopolitics of secularism. It argues that, in the eyes of their countrymen, the Mormons were a people who persistently failed at being secular--whose beliefs were understood to have depraved them, and whose marriage-defiling depravity made them dubious white people--and were disciplined, at high and violent cost, into becoming so. It offers a story of orthodoxy, citizenship, and the fate of the flesh in a secularizing nineteenth-century America.

Religious traditions provide the stories and rituals that define the core values of church members. Yet modern life in America can make those customs seem undesirable, even impractical. As a result, many congregations refashion church traditions so they may remain powerful and salient. How do these transformations occur? How do clergy and worshipers negotiate which aspects should be preserved or discarded? Focusing on the innovations of several mainline Protestant churches in the San Francisco Bay Area, this book provides new understandings of the transformation of spiritual traditions. It argues that these particular congregations typify a new type of Lutheranism—one that combines the evangelical approaches that are embodied in the growing legion of megachurches with American society's emphasis on pragmatism and consumerism. Here it provides vivid descriptions of congregations as they sacrifice hymns in favor of rock music and scrap traditional white robes and stoles for Hawaiian shirts, while also making readers aware of the long history of similar attempts to Americanize the Lutheran tradition. This is an examination of a religion in flux—one that speaks to the growing popularity of evangelicalism in America.

This book describes the convergence of shifts in law, psychology, and religious practice that explains the increasing ubiquity of chaplains across the domains of contemporary life—in hospitals, prisons, the military, as well as in airports, schools, workplaces, and emergency preparedness. The chaplain, it is argued, has become the necessary religious expert who negotiates and bridges the sacred/secular divide through her/his distinctive practice of a ministry of presence. US First Amendment law, as well as popular notions of the shape of religious freedom in a diverse religious society, have enabled the flourishing of the chaplain through a jurisprudence that distinguishes spirituality as a universal attribute of the human, from constitutionally prohibited government religious activity that is establishmentarian, sectarian, or divisive. Private/public regulatory regimes, including accreditation, credentialing, employment discrimination law, and agency regulation, have conspired to universalize and standardize the practice of a ministry of spiritual care by chaplains.

Neuromatic arrives as the designs of neuroscience are sweeping across the arts and humanities, inspiring business leaders and dreams of artificial intelligence, informing public policy and tactics of political mobilization, defining the cutting edge of pharmaceutical research and psychological advance, lacing new age proclamations and the chatter of TED Talk celebrities, and saturating our daily routines of swipe-laden socializing. Such designs have, by the time you are reading this, intensified as humans become more inclined and incentivized to imagine themselves and everything else for that matter in terms of neural networks processing information. How has this neuromatic brain come to frame so many aspects of life? What lies behind its limitless promise of control? Neuromatic addresses the entangled histories of science and religion that lay behind our brain-laden present: from eighteenth-century revivals to the origins of neurology and mystic visions of mental piety in the nineteenth century to cybernetics, Scientologists, parapsychologists, and Bell Laboratory engineers in the twentieth to contemporary claims to have discovered the neural correlates of religion and spirituality. In reprogramming the codes of secular critique, Neuromatic casts the history of neuroscience as a religious revival that is vast in scope and long in the making. At once lyrical and disturbing, Neuromatic reveals the mythic imaginings, ritual schemes, and cosmic concern that have accompanied idealizations of the brain and inquiries into its structure and substance.

In a remarkably short span of time, religious freedom has taken center stage in public and policy debates worldwide. Longstanding legal guarantees of religious freedom built into laws and constitutions over the last few centuries are being mobilized while comparable guarantees are introduced into new types of legal instruments, constitutions, and legislation. In legal and public policy circles, religious freedom is presented as the key to emancipating individuals and communities from violence, poverty, and oppression. What exactly is being promoted through the discourse of religious freedom, and what is not? What is being protected under these various legal instruments? What forms of politics are enabled by these activities? How might we describe the cultural and epistemological assumptions that underlie this frenzy? And, what is its longer and contentious history? This volume seeks to understand the various conceptions of religious freedom at play in the world today, their different social and political contexts, and their varied histories. The volume emerged out of the Politics of Religious Freedom research project, a three-year effort funded by the Luce Foundation to study the discourses of religious freedom in South Asia, North Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States; later expanded to include research on sub-Saharan Africa and Brazil. It is divided into four sections, Religion, History, Law/Politics, and Freedom, each with a brief preface by one of the editors.

Since the 2000 presidential election, debate over the role of religion in public life has followed a narrow course as pundits and politicians alike have focused on the influence wielded by conservative Christians. But what about more mainstream Christians? This book examines the political activities of Methodists and mainline churches in its investigation of a generation of denominational strife among church officials, lobbyists, and activists. The result is an account that upends common stereotypes while asking questions about the contested relationship between church and state. Documenting a wide range of reactions to two radically different events—the invasion of Iraq and the creation of the faith-based initiatives program—the book charts the new terrain of religious and moral argument under President George Bush's administration from Pat Robertson to Jim Wallis. It then turns to the case of the United Methodist Church, of which President Bush is a member, to uncover the twentieth-century history of their political advocacy, culminating in current threats to split the Church between liberal peace-and-justice activists and crusaders for evangelical renewal. The book balances the firsthand drama of this internal account with a meditative exploration of the wider social impact that mainline churches have had in a time of diverging fortunes and diminished dreams of progress. An analysis of how churches keep moral issues alive in politics, it delves deep into mainline Protestant efforts to enlarge civic conscience and cast clearer light on the commonweal, offering an overview of public religion in America.

Sedona, Arizona, has a special energy, according to the people who live there. It permeates the whole area but coalesces in swirling spirals called vortexes, identified with specific red rock formations. People feel called in but then they find it hard to stay, the energy of Sedona spits them out again. Yet Sedona is also a tourist resort, with high real estate prices, and a rental market bottomed out by short-term vacation rentals through sites like Airbnb. Susannah Crockford analyzes both the spiritual explanations for Sedona's specialness and the material conditions which underlay them. Asking what entanglements of race and class remain when people choose to move to Sedona to follow their spiritual path, she highlights how spirituality emerged in the same social and historical conditions as neoliberalism, and how the two are co-constituted by the same characteristics of financialization, privatization, deregulation, and individualism. Based on two years' ethnographic fieldwork in Sedona, the ostensible benefits of positive thinking are put under critical scrutiny, as she shows that alternative narratives constructed against 'mainstream' thinking can also lead to conspiracy theories and self-destruction.