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The essays in this book offer a profile of religion and its relationship to consumption in the modern period. Together they demonstrate how religion manifests in efforts to mass-produce relations of value. Through essays on specific commodities, celebrities, and industries, this book shows how much of consumer life is itself a religious enterprise, religious in the sense of enshrining certain commitments stronger than almost any other acts of social participation. Whereas earlier scholars took as a given the perpetuity of denominated, sectarian religions, this books turns to those practices, businesses, and persons seemingly unhooked from denominational life, such as the universal labor of parenting or the practice of binge viewing, and observes the kinds of social concession and sectarian resistance these practices convey. Using the marketplace as the primary archive of religion, this book shows how certain forms of social life reappear in culture as ways to think through and enact principles.

Providing a new history of the study of religion, Empire of Religion locates knowledge about religion and religions within the power relations of imperial ambitions, colonial situations, and indigenous innovations. The book uncovers the material mediations—imperial, colonial, and indigenous—in which knowledge about religion was produced during the rise of an academic study of religion between the 1870s and the 1920s in Europe and North America. Focusing on one colonial contact zone, South Africa, as a crucial site of interaction, the book shows how imperial theorists such as Friedrich Max Müller, E. B. Tylor, Andrew Lang, and James Frazer depended upon the raw materials provided by colonial middlemen who in turn depended upon indigenous informants and collaborators undergoing colonization. Reversing the flow of knowledge production, African theorists such as W. E. B. Du Bois, S. M. Molema, and H. I. E. Dhlomo turned European imperial theorists of religion into informants in pursuing their own intellectual projects. By developing a material history of the study of religion, Empire of Religion documents the importance of African religion, the persistence of the great divide between savagery and civilization, and the salience of complex mediations in which knowledge about religion and religions was produced, authenticated, and circulated within imperial comparative religion. Empire of Religion shows how knowledge about religion and religions was entangled with imperialism from European empires to the neoimperial United States.

What did Protestants in America think about capitalism when capitalism was first something to be thought about? The Bible told antebellum Christians that they could not serve both God and mammon, but in the midst of the market revolution, most of them simultaneously held on to their faith while working furiously to make a place for themselves in a changing economic landscape. This book explores this paradoxical partnership of transcendent religious values and earthly, pragmatic objectives, ultimately concluding that religious and ethical commitments, rather than political or social forces, shaped responses to market capitalism in the northern states in the antebellum period. Drawing on diverse primary sources, the book identifies three distinct Christian responses to market capitalism: assurance from clerical economists who believed in the righteousness of economic development; opposition from contrarians who resisted the changes around them; and adaptation by the pastoral moralists who modified their faith to meet the ethical challenges of the changing economy. Delving into the minds of antebellum Christians as they considered themselves, their God, and their developing American economy, the book provides an intellectual history of an important development in American religious and economic life.

How does religion stimulate and feed imperial ambitions and violence? Recently this question has acquired new urgency, and this book approaches the problem via a classic but little-studied case: Achaemenian Persia. The book identifies three core components of an imperial theology that have transhistorical and contemporary relevance: dualistic ethics, a theory of divine election, and a sense of salvific mission. Beyond this, he asks, how did the Achaemenians understand their place in the cosmos and their moral status in relation to others? Why did they feel called to intervene in the struggle between good and evil? What was their sense of historic purpose, especially their desire to restore paradise lost? And how did this lead them to deal with enemies and critics as imperial power ran its course? The book shows how these religious ideas shaped Achaemenian practice and brought the Persians unprecedented wealth, power, and territory, but also produced unmanageable contradictions, as in a gruesome case of torture discussed in the book's final chapter. Close study of that episode leads the book back to the present with a postscript that provides a novel perspective on the photographs from Abu Ghraib.

This book examines how the presence of an American evangelical mission in the borderlands between Qajar Iran and the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century contributed to the development of a secular nationalism among the indigenous Neo-Aramaic speaking Christian population of the region. The Americans aimed to “reform” the ancient Church of the East (East Syrians, or Syriac “Nestorians”) by establishing schools, publishing and distributing literature in the vernacular, and preaching a penitential return to “Biblical Christianity,” but their interventions in the region helped to lay the groundwork for the articulation of a new national identity and many East Syrians began to understand themselves as “Assyrians.” A particular evangelical configuration of modernity was cultivated at the mission in the antebellum period, one belonging to a visceral realm often unrecognized in characterizations of secularism and the Enlightenment. In the late nineteenth century liberalizing trends in American Protestantism provided further impetus to the emergence of a distinct Syrian identity as did the proliferation of foreign missions, which caused a fracture in the community resulting in new publicly expressed concerns about the unity of the “nation.” By the turn of the twentieth century some Syrian nationalists responded autoethnographically to the orientalist and biblical archeological knowledge, which the missions had disseminated in vernacular publications, by locating their origins historically in the ancient Near East: they linked the national consciousness that had been developing through the nineteenth century to the name and history of the Assyrians.

Ghosts, railroads, Sing Sing, and sex machines are just a few of the phenomena that appear in this account of religion and society in nineteenth-century America. This book uncovers surprising connections between secular ideology and the rise of new technologies that opened up new ways of being religious. Exploring the eruptions of religion in New York's penny presses, the budding fields of anthropology and phrenology, and Moby Dick, the book challenges the strict separation between the religious and the secular that remains integral to discussions about religion today. It frames the study around the dread, wonder, paranoia, and manic confidence of being haunted, arguing that experiences and explanations of enchantment fueled secularism's emergence. The awareness of spectral energies coincided with attempts to tame the unruly fruits of secularism—in the cultivation of a spiritual self among Unitarians, for instance, or in John Murray Spear's erotic longings for a perpetual motion machine. Combining theoretical inquiry with historical arcana, the book examines long-held views of religion and the methods of narrating its past.