Based on ethnographic and archival research conducted on North American Judaism and Messianic Judaism, this article argues that each group uses DNA in what appear to be sociologically similar ways but that actually differ profoundly at the theological level. Our analysis moves beyond DNA testing per se to focus on what anthropologist Kim Tallbear calls “gene talk,” referring to “the idea that essential truths about identity inhere in sequences of DNA.” Contrasting Jews and Messianic Jews, we demonstrate clearly what scholars have only begun to recognize: how theological commitments may drive investments in genetic science and interpretations of it. Further, we show how religiously significant identities associated with race, ethnicity, or lineage interact with DNA science, coming to be viewed as inalienable qualities that reside in the self but move beyond phenotype alone. Finally, we argue that gene talk in these contexts is a religiously inflected practice, which serves to binds communities and (implicitly or explicitly) authorize existing theological ideals.

Scholars of American religion are increasingly attentive to material culture as a rich source for the analysis of religious identity and practice that is especially revealing of the relationships among doctrine, bodily comportment, social structures, and innovation. In line with this focus, this article analyses the ways nineteenth-century African American Methodist women turned to dress as a tool to communicate religious and political messages. Though other nineteenth-century Protestants also made use of the communicative powers of dress, African American women did so with a keen awareness of the ways race trumped clothing in the semiotic system of nineteenth-century America. Especially for women entering into public fora as preachers and public speakers, dress could act as a passport to legitimacy in an often hostile setting, but it was not always enough to establish oneself as a Christian lady. Considering the related traditions of plain dress and respectability within the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, this essay finds that AME women cultivated respectability and plainness within discourses of authenticity that tried—with some ambivalence—to use dress as a marker of the true soul beneath the fabric. Based primarily on the autobiographical and journalistic writings of women such as Jarena Lee, Amanda Berry Smith, Hallie Q. Brown, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, as well as accounts from AME publications such as the Christian Recorder and the Church Review, and other church documents, the essay also draws on the work of historians of African American women and historians of dress and material culture. For nineteenth-century AME women, discourses of authenticity could be both a burden and a resource, but either way they were discourses that were often remarkably critical, both of selfmotivation and of cultural markers of class, race, and gender in a world that made a fetish of whiteness.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Americans encountered an unexpected group of people who, at first sight, seemed unreal: Hasidic hippies. Conceiving of Hasidic Judaism as being incompatible with the spirit of the era and of hippie culture as being far removed from the Jewish tradition, most Jews could not comprehend how anyone could try to amalgamate two such opposing cultures.

Many of the young Hasidic hippies were affiliated with or influenced by the House of Love and Prayer (HLP), a Jewish outreach center that operated in San Francisco between 1967 and 1977 and promoted the mixture of traditional Hasidic Judaism with the counter-culture. It represented a new generation in American religious life: the baby boomers, with their spiritual journeys and cultural preferences, which included attempts to unite religious traditions and cultural trends that just a few years earlier had seemed too different to bridge. The HLP promoted the return to tradition and the embracing of the mystical and supernatural elements of Judaism. Together with other groups that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s, the HLP helped bring about a revolution in the practicing of the Jewish tradition, one that gave expression to the style and values of the Jewish members of the counterculture.

During the world war years of the early twentieth century, new African American religious movements emerged that emphasized black heritage identities. Among these were Rabbi Wentworth Arthur Matthew's Congregation of Commandment Keepers (Jewish) and “Noble” Drew Ali's Moorish Science Temple of America (Islamic). Unlike African American religions of the previous century, these religious communities distinctly captured the ethos of ethnicity (cultural heritage) that pervaded American social consciousness at the time. Their central message of salvation asserted that blacks were an ethnic people distinguished not by superficial phenotype but by membership in a heritage that reached far beyond the bounds of American history and geography. The academic study of these religions has largely moved from dismissal and cynicism to serious engagement with African American Jews and Muslims as veritable forms of religion. Despite this progress among scholars, some recent studies continue to deny that Matthew’s and Ali's communities were authentically Jewish and Islamic (respectively). When scholars dispense with theological or racial biases that bifurcate religions into ‘true’ and ‘false’ forms, the study of these black ethnic religions might best yield important insights for understanding the linkage among ethnicity, the nation-state, and religion. The religious reasoning of Matthew and Ali produced resourceful, complicated challenges to dominant colonial and racist paradigms for understanding agency and history. Their theology is appropriately discerned not as illusion, hybridity, or confusion but as thoughtful anticolonial expressions of Judaism and Islam that sought inclusion and honor through black ethnicity. At a time when African Americans were viewed as cultureless and without any legacy of inheritance except the deformities of slavery, the rise of black ethnics introduced religious traditions that demonstrated blacks were indeed a people with heritage.

The expanding volume of publications on Buddhism in America in the last two and a half decades bears witness to the emergence of an exciting new subfield within American religion, on the one hand, and within Buddhist studies, on the other. For Americanists, it reflects a growing recognition of the ways in which non-Western religions are altering the American religious landscape. As such, it is part of an emerging awareness of the increasingly pluralistic and multicultural nature of American society at the turn of the millennium. For Buddhologists, the spread of Buddhism in America opens a new chapter in the long history of the geographical and cultural diffusion of the religion since its founding in India some 2,500 years ago. This new subfield thus holds the prospect of studying what promises to be a momentous development in the history of Buddhism, and it affords an opportunity to study the acculturation of the tradition as it is actually occurring. Clearly this is a field where both Americanists and Buddhologists have much to contribute and much to learn from one another.

Ever since C. Eric Lincoln published The Black Muslims in America, in 1961, many observers of the Nation of Islam (NOI) have seemed convinced by his claim that the movement was neither very “religious” nor “Islamic” in nature. In that classic study, currently in its third edition, Lincoln conceded that “the Black Muslim movement constitutes a legitimate religion within the definition of the sociology of religion” but also maintained that “religious values have a secondary importance.” For Lincoln, the success of the movement stemmed not from the particular nature of its religious activities but from its ability to provide a sense of “group solidarity” to the dispossessed black working class. According to Lincoln, this sense of community was produced through the group's embrace of black nationalism, which he understood to be “first a defensive response to external forces—hostile forces that threaten their creative existence.”

New Thought undertones suffused the New Day, a periodical published by Father Divine's Peace Mission Movement, during the 1930s. Bold-faced headlines such as “That Which You Vividly Visualize You Will Materialize” or “The Invisible Is the Reality of the Visible” were clear signposts of that highly influential yet utterly decentral-ized movement that swept across the United States beginning in the latter decades of the nineteenth Century Somewhat more surprising, however, would have been the mixing of these more conventional mind-cure sentiments with ones that highlighted the importance of material substance and the sacredness of human flesh: witness titles such as “Your Bodies Are the Temples of God” and “The Physical Bodies Are the Realizers.” Even more startling may have been titles like “The Material Food We Eat… Is the Actual Tangibilization of the Personification of God's Word, God's Love and God's Presence” and “God Is God in a Body Just Like a Doctor Is a Doctor in a Body—God Has a Body Just Like a Doctor Has.”

In 1872, a young novice, Sister Marie, appeared at the door of the private study of Napoleon Perche, archbishop of New Orleans. This was not Sister Marie's first visit to the archbishop's residence. As a member of the religious order “last in rank” in the city, she was regularly called on to perform housekeeping duties for the archbishop and had worked for him in this capacity first as a postulant and later as a novice. Today, the reason for her visit was different: she appeared before him for the first time in a religious habit, which her order's mother superior, Josephine Charles, had designed and made. Mother Josephine was one of three founders of the Soeurs de Sainte-Famille or Sisters of the Holy Family (SSF), the order lowest in rank in New Orleans because its members were women of African descent.

“It seems to me, now,” reflected Troy Perry, four years after founding a successful new Protestant denomination, “that it must have been a matter of timing, and I think that it was fate, too! God chose me for my mission at a time when He knew the world would respond, once the need was made clear.” While the question of divine ordination is a bit outside the scholar's jurisdiction, the question of timing is a crucial one for historical inquiry, and Perry's remarks show an insightful awareness that the success of the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches (UFMCC) was due in large part to timing. As with any successful religious group, however, the seeds of the UFMCC germinated, sprouted, and grew as a result of a multitude of interconnected factors, including both external back-ground factors in American society at large and internal factors within the UFMCC itself. This article relates the history and early growth of the UFMCC to this constellation of factors in order to gain a clearer understanding of both the denomination itself and the social changes of which it was an integral part.

The U.S. National Parks, which first developed as the nation fragmented during the civil war, have played a central role in the unifying discourse of America. The parks are able to serve this role because of the close alliance between nature and nation in U.S. discourse. Nature “set apart” in the parks becomes the embodiment of an archetypal America, which is the ever-pristine source of the greatness of the nation and the people. As such, it serves as a sacred site and a unifying symbol in U.S. American culture.

By approaching the parks as pilgrimage sites, we can examine the American values that have been embodied in them. Using a model that assumes the heterogeneity of any religio-cultural event, we can see the often conflicting values both in the spiritual, scientific, national and economic discourses that make up the parks and in the embodiment of those discourses in the physical developments in the parks. Central to both is the paradoxical ideal behind the parks: to preserve wilderness.

The goal of the essay is two-fold: 1) as part of the comparative study of religions, to suggest the usefulness of a heterogeneous, spatialized model for analyzing sacred places and to apply the model to the study of American culture in order to understand more about how the embodiment of nature and nation in the National Parks has worked as a unifying symbol while at the same time disclosing contested and conflicting values in American society, and 2) to show how the meanings surrounding this symbol are being transformed today.

Sunday, March 21, 1993, was a memorable day for the more than two thousand members of Highland Park Baptist Church (HPBC) in Southfield, Michigan, for it marked the end of the church's fiftieth annual missions conference. The event had gathered people from HPBC and other churches to discuss the many social, economic, and moral issues threatening the vitality of community life in metro-politan Detroit. Following several rousing hymns, including “Raise Up an Army, O God” and “The City Is Alive, O God,” HPBC senior pastor Leonard Crowley ended the historic proceedings by offering an impassioned sermon on the Judaic institution of “Jubilee,” an Old Testament mandate that called for restoration of land and property to original ownership. Crowley had much to say about this antiquated ideal and its personal application to HPBC members, but the most pointed and intriguing elements of his jeremiad concerned the con-gregational body as a whole.

This essay examines critical modes and dependencies of mid-nineteenth century spiritualism. It looks at the relationship between the ritual dynamics and promotional framings of rappings and séances, and it considers the contested location of those practices within nineteenth-century theories of religion. The argument is threefold: that components of spiritualist practice are better understood alongside certain commercial enterprises; that their examination demands reconsideration of the relative importance of belief, intellection, and criticism in religious ritual; and that, in light of nineteenth-century Americans' own critical thinking on these matters, we understand better the ways in which spiritualism itself became both a location and datum for Americans' definitions of religion. The long-ignored religious theory of P. T. Barnum supports reclamation of the Fox sisters' own ritual practices even as it illustrates the processes by which they were gradually exorcised from American religions, spiritualism, and their historiography. Meanwhile, evidence from court records, newspaper reports, and the professional careers of mediums and their debunkers aids reconstruction of a religious movement that consisted largely, for a time, in the formal recognition of its own skepticism and operational intrigue.

This paper examines a recent arrival on the American pop cultural scene, a type of ghost encounter called After-Death Communications (ADCs). Delivered in dreams, visions, voices, odors, coincidences, etc., these cheerful greetings from deceased loved ones help bereaved survivors cope with their loss. Since the Enlightenment, spirits of the dead have become increasingly irrelevant to collective life. The new phantoms, however, are assigned roles in the family, health, and faith. How has this occurred? Strands of a complicated process are delineated, including medical origins in the bereavement hallucination, a designated symptom of grief. Cultural dynamics behind the current ADC phenomenon are contrasted with national trends that shaped the nineteenth-century spiritualist enthusiasm for ghosts. The literature, published since the 1990s, is reviewed in which the ADC has been formalized as a source of bereavement therapy and revelation. A tally of the peculiar features and functions of this twenty-first-century ghost experience links it to two American industries, psychotherapy and spiritual seeking.

In 1926, the well-known black scholar Ira De Augustine Reid complained that storefront churches were “a general nuisance. Neither their appearance nor their character warrants the respect of the Community.” Mortified, he described the founders of these informal assemblies: “He conducts his Services on such days as he feels disposed mentally and indisposed financially. To this gentleman of the cloth… the church is a legitimate business.” More to the point, he described his perception of the many southern migrants who aspired to found their own churches and religions, recounting how one “young swain” had announced to the leadership of a large traditional black congregation that he had had a dream. “In this dream a still small voice told him to ‘G. P. C.’ and when he heard it he knew that he was instructed to ‘Go Preach Christ.’ After further questioning by the Council, the chairman told him that he had misinterpreted his dream, for it certainly meant ‘Go plant corn’” For many educated African Americans, the idea of southern migrants presuming to enjoy their own religious traditions on their own terms in the urban North was ludicrous.

The study of nineteenth-century U.S. biblical exegesis on the slavery question illumines a fundamental paradox in American religious culture. The relationship between the moral imperative of anti-slavery and the evolution of biblical criticism resulted in a major paradigm shift away from literalism. This moral imperative fostered an interpretive approach that found conscience to be a more reliable guide to Christian morality than biblical authority. Yet, the political imperative of proslavery nourished a biblicism that long antedated the proslavery argumentation and remains prevalent in American moral preaching. The nineteenth-century desire to resolve this paradox led to important innovations in American interpretations of the Bible.

This article seeks to draw attention to an often overlooked aspect of the social gospel. Rather than explaining social gospelers as theological liberals who took an interest in social problems, as many historians have done, this essay argues that they were possessed of a unique theology, one which welded evangelical ideas of conversion and experiential Christianity with liberal postmillennial hopes. Their devotion to combating social ills should be understood, therefore, not solely as a secular commitment to social justice or a nebulous allegiance to Christian charity but also as a theological obligation tied to evangelical conversion and a repudiation of social sin, a crime as offensive to God as murder or theft. The social gospelers modeled the ideal Christian society upon that of the biblical patriarchs, one in which no distinction between the secular and sacred existed and sanctification guided the Christian's actions in the economy as well as in personal morality. That society, that postmillennial Zion, would come again when all humanity experienced a spiritual conversion and were truly born again as Christians—a transformation not limited to individual salvation but which brought with it a new understanding of the nature of Christian life.

This article explains how the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) partnered with African American minister Elder Lightfoot Solomon Michaux to discredit and neutralize Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. The Elder, the nation's first minister (black or white) to have his own weekly television show, colluded with the Bureau to shape public opinion against King and cast doubt upon King's religious commitments and activities. Michaux was, what I call, a Bureau Clergyman: a minister who was an FBI “Special Service Contact” or on the Bureau's “Special Correspondents Lists.” Far from secret informants, black and white male clergy in these official Bureau programs enjoyed very public and cooperative relationships with the FBI and were occasionally “called into service” to work in concert with the FBI. The FBI called upon Michaux and he willingly used his status, popular media ministry, and cold war spirituality to publically scandalize King as a communist and defend the Bureau against King's criticisms. In the end, the Elder demonized King, contested calls for black equality under the law, and lionized the FBI as the keeper of Christian America. The story moves the field beyond the very well known narratives of the FBI's hostility towards religion and reveals how the Bureau publicly embraced religion and commissioned their clergymen to help maintain prevailing social arrangements. Michaux's relationship with the FBI also offers a window into the overlooked religious dimensions of the FBI's opposition to King, even as it highlights how black clergy articulated and followed competing ideologies of black liberation during the civil rights movement.

In the 1950s, the United States experienced a domestic religious revival that offered postwar Americans a framework to interpret the world and its unsettling international political problems. Moreover, the religious message of the cold war that saw the God-fearing West against atheistic communists encouraged an unprecedented ecumenism in American history. Jews, formerly objects of indifference if not disdain and hatred in the United States, were swept up in the ecumenical tide of “Judeo-Christian” values and identity and, essentially, “Christianized” in popular and political culture. Not surprisingly, these cultural trends affected images of the recently formed State of Israel. In the popular and political imagination, Israel was formed by the “Chosen People” and populated by prophets, warriors, and simple folk like those in Bible stories. The popular celebration of Israel also romanticized its people at the expense of their Arab (mainly Muslim) neighbors. Battling foes outside of the Judeo-Christian family, Israelis seemed just like Americans. Americans treated the political problems of the Middle East differently than those in other parts of the world because of the religious significance of the “Holy Land.” A man such as Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who combined views of hard-nosed “realpolitik” with religious piety, acknowledged the special status of the Middle East by virtue of the religions based there. Judaism, part of the “Judeo-Christian civilization,” benefitted from this religious consciousness, while Islam remained a religion and a culture apart. This article examines how the American image of Jews, Israelis, and Middle Eastern politics was re-framed in the early 1950s to reflect popular ideas of religious identity. These images were found in fiction, the press, and the speeches and writings of social critics and policymakers. The article explores the role of the 1950s religious revival in the identification of Americans with Jews and Israelis and discusses the rise of the popular understanding that “Judeo-Christian” values shaped American culture and politics.