In this article, I explore how, from 1977 through 2009, the conservative Christian media empire, Focus on the Family, acted as a model for and a creator of alternative news long before the 2016 election. In particular, since 1977, Focus linked proper Christianity with recognition of a world of hazards by defining danger as those people and institutions who refused to submit to God, especially feminists, secular universities, and the welfare state. Through the creation of a closed-media network, Focus taught Christian conservatives to see the mainstream news as undermining biblical Truth by espousing stories that supported postmodern relativism over God's singular truth. Simultaneously, Focus generated its own news sources to fill the vacuum left by the mainstream with stories highlighting the political and social structures needed to support the Focus-defined traditional family. Soon, other conservative media outlets began using these frameworks to attract listeners and to add veracity to their stories. Although mainstream media portrayed Focus as passé by 2009, I argue that the model that Focus developed led seamlessly to the creation of Fox News and, later, to the formation of internet communities around outlets such as Breitbart and to the believability of Russian bots.

This essay explores how some Americans came to view the Federal Council of Churches (FCC) and, more broadly, ecumenical mainline Protestantism as a threat to the national security interests of the United States. By focusing on the efforts of various elements in the federal bureaucracy—including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Chemical Warfare Service, and Military Intelligence—and the work of average Americans to investigate the FCC, the essay examines how techniques of surveillance and information management helped shape the way Americans came to understand religion in the twentieth century. The essay develops three interconnected themes: first, the rise of America's national security surveillance establishment in the United States after World War I; second, the development of new methods of information management and visualization in corporate and state bureaucracies; and, third, the rise of voluntary, private surveillance in the wake of World War I. Through these three themes, the essay highlights how a network of federal bureaucrats, business leaders, and average citizens used graphs, indexes, and files to interpret mainline, ecumenical Christianity as a threat to domestic security in the United States. Ultimately, the project suggests that scholarly efforts to assess fissures in U.S. Protestantism have focused too much on controversies over belief and theology—especially those related to evolutionary theory, eschatology, and scriptural inerrancy—and paid far too little attention to the emerging bureaucratic systems of state and corporate surveillance that helped to document, visualize, and disseminate these accusations in the first place.

This article examines comedian Richard Claxton “Dick” Gregory's comical articulation of religious belief and belonging through his speeches and religious writings during the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that, during his most visible public presence as an activist and comedic entertainer, Gregory bore an irreverent scriptural authority for his readers and comedy audiences who sought a prominent, public affirmation of their suspicion and criticism of religious authorities and conventional religious teachings. This suspicion would allow them to grapple with the oppressive presence of religion in the long history of Western colonialism, in the U.S. context of slavery, and in the violence and segregation of Jim Crow America. Following this religious suspicion, however, Gregory's consistent goal was to implement just social teachings stemming from socially and theologically progressive readings of the Hebrew Bible and of the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels. Gregory's irreverence modeled, and reflected, the maintenance of belief in both the divine and in the justness of remaking an oppressive, violent, unequal world through nonviolent activism in accordance with his understanding of the teachings of the King James scriptures that he read throughout his life. This study of comedy uses one African American male's production of irreverent, authoritative religious rhetoric to display a noteworthy mode of mid-century African American religious liberalism. It is also a case study highlighting the complexity of religious belief and affiliation. Despite acknowledged ambivalences about his commitments to religion, Gregory also modeled ways for audiences to reframe religious commitments to produce social change.

This article tracks changes in conceptions of American Jewish congregational prayer music during the second half of the twentieth century, paying specific attention to the late 1960s and early 1970s. During those years, more than fifty albums of new American Jewish synagogue music were released. These drew on the sounds of folk and rock music, and they represented a shift from the sounds of classical cantorial synagogue music. These changes have largely been understood as a shift away from cantorial styles, which emphasized performance and virtuosity, and toward more accessible and more participatory forms of prayer. This article contributes to our understanding of the sounds of American Jewish prayer practices by attending to the larger discourses in which the musical changes were situated. By listening to the music, reading album liner notes, and contemporaneous writings about Jewish prayer music, we discover a shift in descriptions and expectations of how Jewish prayer ought to work, from one that emphasizes the aesthetics of the music to one that emphasizes the experience of the music. We argue that music is one element of a larger shift in how people who made music for congregational prayer understood prayer and how best to engage congregations in that practice.

When Eldridge Cleaver, the former Black Panther Party Minister of Information, returned to the United States in November 1975, he claimed to have surrendered his life to Christ and conservatism. Utilizing the Eldridge Cleaver Papers housed at the Bancroft Library, this article recounts the transformation of Eldridge Cleaver from radical Black Panther to born-again Christian and anticommunist crusader. Cleaver's story of transformation demonstrates the pervasive power of the twentieth-century crusade against communism and the manner in which American conservatism created distinct categories of race that were written on the mind, body, religious belief, and practice of Eldridge Cleaver. This article highlights how conservatives enacted a program of racial respectability, remaking Eldridge in the image of conservative, capitalist, Christian whiteness. Cleaver was stripped of his “blackness,” a conservative effort to distance him from the “volatile black figures” of the mid-twentieth century. If Cleaver held on to any vestige of his old life—his leather jacket, “regional euphemisms,” liberationist ideology, and even his Afro hairstyle—his new life would be useless to conservatives. This article illustrates how Cleaver participated in a global crusade that sought to maintain and extend the unifying commitments of twentieth-century religious conservatism. Those commitments included (1) the commercial, economic, and political interests that produced, funded, and policed conservatism; (2) traditional white, middle-class family values; and (3) political, racial, gendered, and religious understandings of the citizen subject. Eldridge Cleaver and his anticommunist crusade are windows into the distinct categories of religion, politics, and race—Christianity, conservatism, and white respectability—constructed and enacted by American conservatives in the twentieth century.

This article argues that the case of religious authority within Orthodox Judaism is an important counterexample to the broader and understudied developments in American religion during the final decades of the twentieth century. Using an array of untapped primary sources and drawing on themes addressed by scholars of American religious history and modern Jewish history, this article demonstrates how Orthodox Jewish elites used “approximational heresies” to police their faith community. In so doing, Orthodox leaders furnished “indicators” of apostasy that were unknown in previous epochs and served to stand in for traditional types that proved otherwise insufficient to counteract new trends in modern life and culture. Orthodox Jewish “antimodernism” was animated by a need to demonstrate what was “in” and what was “out” of bounds as well as by the emergence of a triumphalism that was unique among American faiths. Likewise, the rank-and-file abided because they either agreed with these measures or feared becoming “outsiders.” This outlook contrasts with the attitudes of other religious groups—on the “left” and the “right”—that absorbed a spirit of “inclusiveness” and, therefore, eschewed heresy hunting and the boldness evinced by Orthodox elites during this period. The article concludes that the pervasiveness of this counterculture among the Orthodox Jewish community was so powerful that it, counterintuitively, introduced the strategies of the antimodernists to the American-acculturated, so-called Modern Orthodox community.

This article explores the backstory of a 1953 screenplay on the life of the Buddha conceived by the CIA as a psychological warfare strategy to draw Asian Buddhists away from the Communist orbit and into the Free World. Developed in collaboration with Ceylonese Buddhist scholar G. P. Malalasekera, Tathagata: The Wayfarer (hereafter, Wayfarer) is best read through the lens of the U.S. Campaign of Truth propaganda effort launched by Truman in 1950. I draw on declassified government documents and archives to highlight the screenplay's trajectory as a covert attempt by the U.S. government to work with Asian Buddhists to further U.S. foreign policy needs in Asia and to demonstrate a truth rarely recognized by scholars of religion and American culture: For the early Cold War American state, Buddhism was an object of foreign policy.

Robert H. Schuller's Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California, appeared to be the model of growth and stability among megachurches—until it imploded. Drawing on archival material and interviews, this article demonstrates how the seeming success of Schuller's church growth philosophy was built on a precarious structure that demanded the continual management of flows of capital. In Schuller's vision, a church's capacity must always exceed a leader's projected plan for growth. Large capital projects stimulate revenue, yet borrowed funds are required to accommodate growth in membership that will produce income to pay off loans later. As new members join, however, structures expand, placing increased strain on mobilizing the loyalty of a wider constituency to uphold the charisma-bearing enterprise. Ensuring the credibility of pastoral charisma requires ever expanding infrastructure, which, in turn, demands increased funding for programs, staff, and buildings—a vicious spiral, exacting enormous strains for sustaining the entire ministry.

This essay traces the evolution of a specific tradition of prophecy interpretation in U.S. pentecostal-charismatic circles, which I dub the “prophetic politics of dominion.” From the start, this strain of pentecostal-charismatic religiosity merged transnational sensibilities with dominion-style language but typically shied away from overt political organization. Building on Israel-themed symbols and ideas acquired from nineteenth-century evangelical prophecy interpretation, a small but influential group of white proto-pentecostals and early pentecostals embraced a distinctive set of eschatological teachings known as British Israelism and its attendant literal racial identification of Anglo-Saxons with Jews. Such emphases bolstered a conviction that spirit-empowered Christians would exert significant influence on global politics prior to the Second Coming of Jesus. In the ensuing decades, a vocal minority of notable pentecostals and their charismatic successors kept alive similar emphases even as they eschewed the highly racialized conceptions of pentecostal connections to the “Lost Tribes of Israel.” More comfortable employing Christian millennial tropes than engaging pragmatic politics, these figures, nevertheless, anticipated the rapid Christianization of society and their own ascendance to positions of spiritual and temporal power in preparation for Christ's return. All the while, Israel-centric symbols and identities remained central. The crystallization of this transnational, dominion-now tradition, with its unique Israel-centric emphases and millennial motifs, represented one of the most significant—and most misunderstood—contributions to evangelical politics by U.S. pentecostals and charismatics over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Although the civil rights movement has long been framed as a pivotal turning point in twentieth-century U.S. religious history, comparatively little attention has been directed to the role of religion in what has been termed “the long segregation movement.” Likewise, Catholic historians tend to emphasize the exceptional few priests, sisters, and lay people committed to interracial justice over and against the majority of white Catholics who either opposed integration or objected to the means by which it would be achieved. This article argues that, in order to fully understand U.S. Catholicism in the twentieth century, scholars must reckon with the ways racial whiteness shaped the Catholicness of white Catholics. It takes as its primary source more than six hundred letters written by white Catholics outraged and disgusted over the Archdiocese of Chicago's apparent support for desegregation between 1965 and 1968. These letters not only illuminate the inseparability of religion and race, but they also reveal that white Catholicism itself operated as a religio-racial formation in the lives of white Catholics. Given the overwhelming white Catholic (and white religious) resistance to integration, this article argues that the long segregation movement and massive resistance to desegregation ought to be included as signal events in the telling of U.S. Catholic and U.S. religious history.

This article begins with a simple question: How did white evangelicals respond to the civil rights movement? Traditional answers are overwhelmingly political. As the story goes, white evangelicals became Republicans. In contrast, this article finds racial meaning in the places white evangelicals, themselves, insisted were most important: their churches. The task of evangelization did not stop for a racial revolution. What white evangelicals did with race as they tried to grow their churches is the subject of this article. Using the archives of the leading evangelical church growth theorists, this article traces the emergence and transformation of the Church Growth Movement (CGM). It shows how evangelistic strategies created in caste-conscious India in the 1930s came to be deployed in American metropolitan areas decades later. After first resisting efforts to bring these missionary approaches to the United States, CGM founder Donald McGavran embraced their use in the wake of the civil rights movement. During the 1970s, the CGM defined white Americans as “a people” akin to castes or tribes in the Global South. Drawing on the revival of white ethnic identities in American culture, church growth leaders imagined whiteness as pluralism rather than hierarchy. Embracing a culture of consumption, they sought to sell an appealing brand of evangelicalism to the white American middle class. The CGM story illuminates the transnational movement of people and ideas in evangelicalism, the often-creative tension between evangelical practices and American culture, and the ways in which racism inflected white evangelicals’ most basic theological commitments.