CFP: Graduate Student Conference on Democracy and Religion

Lauren Turek

I would like to share the following call for papers that I received. This conference looks fantastic and would be an excellent opportunity for graduate students of all levels.

Call For Papers:
Graduate Student Conference on Democracy and Religion

University of Virginia, April 12, 2019

The UVA Department of Religious Studies’ Forum on Democracy and Religion invites paper proposals for a graduate student conference to be held on April 12, 2019. Graduate students at any level and in any disciplinary field are welcome to apply.

Our focus will be on the relationship between democracy and religion. We are particularly interested in such issues as: the current contest between free exercise and human dignity; the shifting sites of the “public square,” including its market dimensions; the relationship between neoliberalism and international religious freedom; how discussions of religious minorities, race, and gender shape what we mean by religion and democracy; and whether democracy needs religion or what kind of religion needs democracy.

Paper proposals should be no less than five pages long, exclusive of notation. Full papers are preferred. Panel proposals are welcome but not necessary. Panel participants will receive a $500 honorarium.

Paper selection will begin January 25th, 2019, and continue until the program is announced and panelists notified, no later than March 15. Please send all proposals by email attachment to Spencer Wells, Executive Assistant for the Forum on Democracy and Religion, at spencerwells@virginia.edu

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Graziano on Wenger's Religious Freedom

This is the final review in our round table on Tisa Wenger's Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal (2017). For previous entries, see reviews by Kime, Zubovich, and Su. Look for a response from the author tomorrow!

Michael Graziano

Tisa Wenger’s Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal (2017) is an ambitious book. It’s asking big questions about religious freedom and looking for answers in an international context. Rather than interrogating religious freedom as something familiar--something good or bad, a myth or an impossibility--Wenger is instead interested in who talks about religious freedom, and why they do so. Ranging from the 1890s to the 1930s, Wenger examines what people had to gain (or, perhaps, what they hoped others might lose) by engaging in what she terms “religious freedom talk.”

Wenger sees religious freedom as part of an Enlightenment project, an idea that challenged empire but also contributed to it, since ideas about freedom (particularly when paired with ideas about race) helped explain why certain areas had to be conquered, colonized, and controlled. Wenger situates religious freedom in the early 20th century as something important but mercurial, developing alongside what she terms the “imperial hierarchies of race, nation, and religion” (2). In no uncertain terms, Religious Freedom argues that religious freedom cannot be understood apart from histories of race, empire, and nation: these are not historiographic side dishes in a book otherwise about “religious freedom.” In Wenger’s telling, U.S. religious freedom--from its emergence out of the efforts to protect conscience during the Enlightenment--provided space for race and religion to intermingle and mutually develop. Wenger argues persuasively that to track one of these “assemblages” (a term she borrows from Deleuze) requires thoughtfully interrogating them all.

This is also a book interested in modernity, and what it means to be “modern.” For the subjects in this book, being modern means being free--religiously free--and self-governing. White Anglo Protestant Christianity was understood as the peak of civilizational progression (by, as it happens, White Anglo Protestant Christians). These same people perceived other races, religions, and nationalities as unable to catch up. We’ve heard parts of this story before, but Wenger’s contribution is to show how this tension plays out simultaneously at home and abroad. In other words, it is neither solely a domestic or foreign development. As the language of religious freedom came to mark people who were fully modern from those who were not, for example, some American Catholics and Jews used religious freedom to cloak themselves in the protective whiteness of the imperial project. Around the same time, Christian Filipino leaders--fresh from wars with Spain and the United States--reimagined religious freedom talk in order to distinguish themselves from their Muslim neighbors and argue for the national independence of a united Philippine islands. For others, including especially Native Americans and African Americans, appeals to religious freedom were less effective, having to overcome as they did the imperial systems of the Reservation and Jim Crow. Through each example, Wenger makes clear that religious freedom is a strategy, a way to be a civilized modern in a world where one's ability to be oneself correlated with how civilized and how modern one was presumed to be by people in power.

To my mind (that is, a mind interested in religion, law, and national security) the book is particularly noteworthy for three reasons.

First, the book begins in the 1890s. In the history of American religion and law, this is significant: Wenger’s is a history of religious freedom that begins before the incorporation of the First Amendment’s religion clauses (that is, before individual states were bound by them). It can be tempting--and I write from personal experience--to begin narrating this history after the Supreme Court (attempted) to standardize religious freedom law. For a subfield that often seems very SCOTUS-centric, this is a welcome change. This allows Wenger to highlight diverse understandings of religious freedom as they percolated around the country.

The second noteworthy point is not when the book begins, but when it ends: before World War II. Wenger is interested in American empire. This is an important topic on its own, but many studies of American empire focus on the 1940s and subsequent Cold War, when the emergence of American global power refigured how the US acted on the world stage. That later time period rightfully receives a great deal of attention, but Wenger makes clear that the early 20th century offers scholars of American religion just as much to consider.

Finally, Wenger does both of the above by attending to assemblages of race (not while or in addition to looking at race) because, as she demonstrates, attention to race is necessary to understand these broader changes. Wenger’s book suggests that the multifaceted approach we have come to appreciate in religious studies and US history--an approach that presumes attention to gender, race, class, etc. is always already necessary & present--is in some sense about religious freedom, or at least about how competing understandings of the idea have shaped American history (and the history of the wider world) in important and powerful ways. Two examples I found particularly persuasive involved Filipino perspectives on modernity and Native American negotiations around the Ghost Dance.

In the first case, Wenger demonstrates that talking about religious freedom was a way to claim being modern. This was recognized not just by American observers--who dismissed Filipino claims to both religious freedom and self-governance--but by the Filipinos themselves, who saw that “religious freedom” had a special currency in US politics. Invoking it was a way to say that they, too, were modern and that they, too, were capable of governing themselves. In the second case, Wenger uses the Ghost Dance to make clear that “religious freedom talk” could offer strategic advantages for liminal groups, but always at the cost of painful trade-offs (109-112). Making religious freedom claims meant conforming (to a certain extent) with the dominant society’s vision of proper religiosity, and so Native American religious practices were consciously reimagined to look as Christian as possible. Wenger illustrates how these self-conscious changes allowed some of these groups and their practices to survive without losing sight of the fact that it was white settler Christianity--itself supported by ideas of religious freedom--that compelled these changes in the first place.

While the periodization offers much for readers to consider, I was left wondering whether the anti-imperialist critiques after World War II--particularly those that would be made by some of these same White Anglo Protestant Christians--had antecedents in this time period. Where would we root the liberal critics of the US military-industrial complex in this narrative? Similarly, how should we make sense of other transnational relationships of religious groups--such as American Catholic relations to the Vatican during the rise of European Fascism--as part of the focus on US empire?

Of course, it’s easy for a reviewer to suggest other angles when a book ambitiously surveys as much time and as many places as this one does. The book necessarily relies on a wide range of secondary literatures. Wenger is clear in how she connects these literatures (and in how they fit into her thesis) but the analysis often takes a front seat, limiting the impact of the individual actors who pop up in the text or are hinted at in footnotes. There are individuals who shine through (I was particularly fascinated by Dean Worcester, a University of Michigan Zoologist who took on an official role in the US’s civilizing imperial project in the Philippines [30-43]). At times, though, I did wish the book would pause the analysis to linger at greater length on individual subjects and their stories.

I noted this absence largely because at other times stories and analysis are balanced with great effect. This is evident in one of my favorite parts of the book, the section on the Moros in the Philippines (82-100). In under twenty pages, Wenger covers a lot of ground and makes it look easy: from how religious freedom discourses operated “at home” and “abroad,” to the parallels in American perceptions of Muslims and Mormons, to how in turn this parallel was gendered and racialized through marking certain practices (such as polygamy or slavery) as uniquely racial and unmodern. Wenger does this without losing touch with the sources of both US officials and Moros leaders. This is a section I plan to assign to future classes, since it encapsulates Wenger’s big ideas so well.

In this section, as in others, Wenger deploys a battery of primary sources. Her paragraphs are peppered with one or two-word quotes, allowing the reader to stay focused on the book’s arguments while not forgoing a taste of the primary sources themselves. For example, Wenger uses an October 1899 issue of the periodical Outlook to illustrate the divergent interests of empire. Wenger shows how to a contemporary reader, news reports of the Boer War competed for page space with condemnations of Filipino barbarity, alongside news of the business world and laments for the insufficiently manly seminary education of then-contemporary American ministers. Wenger presents these concerns about race, nation, gender, and religion in the service of demonstrating how religious freedom “helped constitute the civilization hierarchies of empire” (34).


From my vantage point, we needed a book like this. As Americans began exporting their own brand of religion and religious freedom to the rest of the world, this necessarily had an effect on foreign peoples and lands in addition to Americans on US soil (wherever it was in the world). Wenger’s work is a reminder that for many Americans, to be religious meant to be free. And this mattered, in short, because the people making decisions about world order were, increasingly, Americans.

Michael Graziano is an Instructor in the Department of Philosophy and World Religions at the University of Northern Iowa.

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Su on Wenger's Religious Freedom

This is the third entry in our review round table on Tisa Wenger's Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal (2017). For previous entries, see reviews by Kime and Zubovich.

Anna Su

Wenger’s Contested History is the first to examine holistically the history of religious freedom within the United States largely outside the confines of the history generated by the Religion Clauses of the U.S. Constitution. Among others, it serves to bridge existing scholarly conversations on the critique of secularism, religious freedom in U.S. foreign policy, and religion in U.S. history. Those familiar with the works of Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan on the disciplinary inclinations of religious freedom would find much fodder in this book for support.

In many ways, it lays out a rich new canvas with which to look at the questions raised in those aforementioned conversations. For instance, in what ways did religious freedom talk emancipate or subjugate racialized minorities? What are inherent limitations of a religious freedom frame for the achievement of wide-ranging goals that go beyond religion? But it is also an important contribution that it raises these questions within a primarily settler-colonial context. To what extent do those questions endure in our present?

The United States is an exceptionally good case study given the prominence and cultural power of religious freedom in its social and political imaginary, one that is largely absent in any other Western nation. If I have to single out one chapter, the book provides a much-needed historical context to the continuing struggles of Native Americans to render their claims legible to the American state, one that is also shared by indigenous communities elsewhere, certainly in Canada. Alongside Native Americans, the book also looks at the case of Jews, African-Americans and the colonized Filipinos at the height of America’s fin de siècle brush with formal empire. What the overall narrative reveals is that American religious freedom discourse is indeed malleable – but with limits. Like a mirage in the desert, religious freedom offered a promise of salvation to these communities, only for them to realize that it was only possible insofar as the underlying ‘civilizational assemblage,’ as Wenger terms it, would allow. For example, latching on to the emancipatory language of religion and religious freedom allowed American Jews and Catholics to claim the protective mantle of whiteness and with that, equal political status. Native Americans, and most notably, African-Americans, however, could not do the same.

In a related book, Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America, historian and legal scholar Sarah Barringer Gordon offers a companion narrative of how generations of religious communities took the promise of the Religion Clause as a weapon in their fight against oppression. That book ends on a somewhat more hopeful note, that is, the turn to constitutional law by religious believers is responsible for the toleration that exists in American society by creating unlikely partnerships. Reading Wenger in tandem shows a less optimistic outlook. Whether the U.S. federal government was banning peyote use by Native Americans outright in the 1920s, or the U.S. Supreme Court denying unemployment benefits to a person fired for violating a state ban on the use of peyote in 1990, religious freedom – whether dressed in full-on legal language or as everyday language in public discourse – just might not be enough.

To be sure, religious freedom was not devoid of any power even for Native Americans, colonized Filipinos or African-Americans. For example, Malcolm X’s campaign for religious recognition on First Amendment grounds within the harsh confines of a prison – both a claim for legitimacy and a defensive strategy, in Wenger’s words – helped in catalyzing black identity but also produced results that still continues to benefit other communities of faith. But it also reinforced the public-private binary of secularism. The Filipino Muslims or Moros, for example, invoked religious freedom as they negotiated their relations with the United States as a new colonial power but in the process, their political makeup was changed as well as the sultan’s erstwhile overarching authority became narrowed down to its religious dimension.

I find myself in agreement with much of this book, not only with its motivations but also with its argument and takeaways. Like Wenger’s conclusion, I too also do not necessarily see religious freedom as inherently imperial. I sought to emphasize this in my own book, Exporting Freedom: Religious Liberty and American Power, which portrays the promotion of religious freedom abroad by the U.S. government as hand-in-hand with the rise of American global power. I also share the impulse to highlight the less savory aspects of history of religious freedom in order to counter the celebratory accounts – which is still prevalent in many quarters today, including the legal academy - that justify and facilitate its use and abuse.

One important thing worth mentioning however is that Contested History portrays religious freedom as a distinctive American ideal that notwithstanding its limitations have always offered something transcendental and substantive. However, I am not so certain anymore about how much of its message still holds in the contemporary period. According to a Pew Research report, the number of unaffiliated “religious nones” in America have sharply risen in number in recent years. While the population remains overwhelmingly Christian, it remains to be seen how many of these Christians are actually practicing. The malleability of religious freedom certainly continues to have contemporary resonance. How else to explain the religious liberty order of President Donald Trump which, among others, offers robust protections for religious employers, on the one hand, and the so-called Muslim travel ban, on the other? Despite the fact that we no longer identify religious liberty with Christianity, as we once did for a significant part of American history, perhaps some of that history remains in its current incarnation. Like the trajectory I set forth in my own work, we raise similar questions today as the ones raised in the Wenger’s account but with no longer the same underlying assumptions.

Today, religion – and by extension –religious freedom, it seems, is no longer special. What I mean by that is the view that religion is considered no better than any other deeply held moral commitment and therefore does not and should not warrant any special treatment under the law. While that question has been the subject of legal academic debate even before the controversial Hobby Lobby decision of the U.S. Supreme Court or even before Trump became President, it is not an issue merely entertained within the cloistered halls of the legal academy. Consider the popular reception of the question of accommodation of religion. It used to be the case that exemptions from legally imposed burdens on religious belief and practice were seen as a natural response to the tension between law and religion. There were exceptions of course – the case of 19th century Mormon polygamy is the most glaring one – but by and large, the question has always been which branch of government gets to accommodate religious objectors and to what extent, as opposed to the more fundamental question of whether accommodation should be granted at all. Corollary to the shift in religious demographics is the shift in popular and academic understanding of what religious freedom is supposed to achieve. The same bipartisan consensus that fueled the politically diverse coalition behind the Religious Freedom Restoration Act a mere twenty years ago has now crumbled to ashes. That it is now commonplace to ask “is religion special?” shows a markedly different milieu to that surrounding the stories found in Wenger’s narrative. It is rather telling that American Christians currently feel, rightly or wrongly, that they are on the defensive, as the Trump religious liberty executive order seems to imply. Certainly, religious freedom remains important, but its distinctive cachet that is on full display in the case studies that are subject of Wenger’s account is most intelligible only to a populace that somehow believes that religion remains a sacred lens with which to view all of existence. That it is no longer true for an increasing number of Americans seems to portend an uphill struggle for religious freedom as well.

Part of the reason is that we have started to find other sources of transcendence. The rise of equality as the dominant constitutional ideal in the postwar era partly made possible the ongoing culture war that pits, for instance, marriage equality against religious freedom. And religious freedom, with all that it entails, including accommodations and/or exemptions, started to be perceived as anathema to this ideal even before Hobby Lobby and its ilk of cases came into popular view in the past five years. The implication of this demoted status for religious freedom is disturbing. It loses its moral appeal as a singular avenue to vindicate the claims of various marginalized communities.

In other words, perhaps religious freedom today does not have the same power as it once did. Could present-day American Muslims resort to religious freedom talk as the African-Americans or the American Jews and Catholics depicted in Contested History did? I suspect they are now probably better off appealing to the ideal of equality in general or freedom of speech, perhaps, as much more effective frames that could resonate with the their fellow citizens. But if I am correct and that is indeed the case, that is a loss worth lamenting. Religious freedom was important because religion offered something transcendental even though it may not always have been the best means to bring about a certain result; it implied community and solidarity. Its alternatives I fear might offer something that will always ever fall short of that.

This brings me back to the continuing value of a book such as Contested History given this bleak diagnosis of the state of religious freedom in the contemporary United States. These less-celebrated stories, with all its small triumphs and large pitfalls, should be a timely reminder that religious freedom has benefitted not only Christians but also other religious communities in various ways throughout history. These victories might not be as all-encompassing as one would have wanted them to be at those particular moments in time but notions of religious freedom have changed over the years as well. Its distinctive emancipatory potential is something that should be preserved and cherished not only by the remaining religious believers but the non-believers as well. The Foucauldian critics of religion and religious freedom such as Sullivan and Mahmood may be right on highlighting the managerial aspects of religious freedom, governing as it is freeing, and excluding inasmuch as it likewise includes. I do not have any problems with having an honest reckoning with the paradoxes of religious freedom but inasmuch as Contested History shows the mirage sometimes offered by this ideal, it also shows that it can sometimes be a real oasis in a desert of injustice. Communities which would not otherwise have access to a seat on the table of American politics were able to articulate their claims and even, as a mode of resistance, using this frame. Religious freedom, for all its ambivalence and racialized limitations, deserves another chance.

Anna Su is Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law 

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Zubovich on Wenger's Religious Freedom

This is the second entry in our review round table on Tisa Wenger's Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal (2017). For previous entries, see here.

Gene Zubovich

One of the big stories of the twentieth century is the transition from empires to nation-states as the basis of world order. In less than a hundred years, the majority of the world’s peoples went from living under colonialism to living under nation-states. The number of countries in the world grew from about 50 in the year 1900 to over 200 by the end of the century. Today, the nation-state, whether in fact or in aspiration, is nearly universal.

Tisa Wenger’s Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal is a welcome and timely addition to a growing body of literature that helps us connect the world of empire to the world of the nation-state (1). It does so by looking at the role of religious freedom in undergirding American empire and the dissent religious freedom inspired. The book offers a rich portrait of the uses of religious freedom roughly from the War of 1898, when the United States first became an empire, to World War II. Wenger’s argument about religious freedom unfolds in two steps. First, Wenger argues that one of the primary uses of religious freedom has been to support American empire. Empire is premised on a racialized hierarchy of peoples, with white Americans near the top and the Filipinos near the bottom. Arguing that native peoples abroad were not fit to handle their own affairs, American politicians made the case that the country would bring religious freedom to the colonies. This was an Orwellian freedom-is-slavery way of thinking about places like the Philippines, justifying imperialism in the name of liberty.

Building on this argument about racialized hierarchies of empire, Wenger shows that certain groups in the United States were able to move up the hierarchy of peoples by reconceiving of themselves as “religious” rather than as “racial” groups. Jews and Catholics, in particular, were able to move up the racial hierarchy in the United States, ultimately becoming white, by supporting imperialism.

A focus on empire as a framework for understanding religious liberty leads to many insights. Wenger is at her best when discussing the colonization of the Philippines and the dispossession and subjugation of Native Americans. In both instances, religious liberty endowed Americans with a false sense of superiority and undergirded American empire with liberal conceits. She skillfully shows how subjugated peoples at home and abroad talked back to empire, using the rhetoric of religious freedom to defend themselves. Religious freedom was a poor weapon for most of these groups, especially for African Americans, but it was a weapon nonetheless. Here religious freedom unfolds in all of its complexity, serving both power and the powerless, while constraining in a variety of ways the relationship between colonizer and colonized.

But at other moments the empire framework becomes strained and occasionally leads to mundane observations. Take the example of American criticism of pogroms in the Russian empire in the early 20th century. “Advocacy for persecuted Jews abroad may seem disconnected from the horrors of American racism,” Wenger admits, “But by condemning Russian anti-Semitism as a violation of religious freedom, white Americans could celebrate their own nation as the land of liberty and so masked the reality of racial oppression against people of color inside the United States.” (152) This is doubtlessly one of the functions of protestations against pogroms but surely there are other and more significant consequences.

The triangulation of empire, race, and religious liberty yield many important insights in Religious Freedom, ones that will rightfully garner attention and engagement from scholars. But because so much of the premise of this dialogue is centered on religious communities bounded by the nation-state, it made me wonder how different our understanding of religious freedom would be if we thought of some of these national religious communities as international communities. Catholics, for example, were part of a global communion that included the Vatican. In Wenger’s narrative, American Catholics crafted their religious liberty arguments to make room for themselves as a religious minority in a tri-faith nation. True religious freedom, they argued, would make room for Catholics in the political imaginary of the United States, where they would be on equal footing with Protestants. But was religious liberty talk so central to Catholic discourse as Wenger implies? The 1864 Syllabus of Errors (which detailed the faults of liberalism), the “Americanism” controversy of 1898 (where American individualism and the separation of church and state were criticized), and Vatican II (which scholars  often cite as the moment when the Vatican accepted religious freedom and the legitimacy of the Jewish religion) might receive more attention than they do in reference to Catholic thought when situating American Catholicism in a more global context. Given what we know about anti-liberalism in European Catholicism in the era Wenger focuses on, I wonder whether portraying American Catholic discourse as religious-freedom-as-pluralism doesn’t reduce the complexity of Catholic thought and political commitments on the subject.

Similarly, American Protestants supported colonialism. But some were also engaged in an international ecumenical endeavor, beginning in the late nineteenth century, to unite the world’s Protestants. Out of this project came searing critiques of both nationalism and racism, as Michael Thompson’s important study of the interwar era points out. Indeed, by World War II, the leaders of the ecumenical movement announced that the first right was “Freedom of religion and conscience” and, in the same breath, say that “these rights cannot be obtained under a system of racial segregation” and that “the churches must work for a non-segregated church and a non-segregated society" (2).  In their minds, religious freedom was necessary for the free choice of individuals to obey moral law, and that moral law required both desegregation and self-determination. In the 1940s, when Wenger’s narrative ends, the Federal Council of Churches and other ecumenical Protestant organizations decided that religious liberty, race, and colonialism were bound together in precisely the opposite way as described in the pages of Wenger’s book: religious liberty required desegregation and decolonization. This was, of course, only one of many meanings of religious liberty in circulation at the time but it was one of the most important. Leafing through the pages of Wenger’s book, I find very little to help me understand how, in the first half of the twentieth century religious liberty came to have this emancipatory connotation.

Wenger’s Religious Freedom is a critical and wide-ranging account of religious freedom, race, and American empire. It will doubtlessly become a reference point for historians who continue to struggle to make sense of the role of religion in the end of empire—if it did, in fact, end—and the rise of the nation-state.

Gene Zubovich is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Washington University in St. Louis

(1) Among the most recent work on this subject are David Hollinger’s Protestants Abroad, Michael Thompson’s For God and Globe, Adam Becker’s Revival and Awakening: American Evangelical Missionaries and the Origins of Assyrian Nationalism (2015), Anna Su’s Exporting Freedom, Andrew Preston’s Sword of the Spirit and Shield of Faith, Rebecca Hodges’s “Christian Citizenship and the Foreign Work of the YMCA” Udi Greenberg, “Protestants, Decolonization, and European Integration, 1885–1961,” Journal of Modern History 89, no. 2 (June 2017): 314–54; Or Rosenboim, The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, 1939–1950 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).
(2) “Text of Council Statement,” New York Times, December 4, 1948, 11.

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Review Roundtable on Wenger's Religious Freedom

This essay kicks off our review roundtable on Tisa Wenger's recent book, Religious Freedom
The Contested History of an American Ideal (2017).  Over the course of this week, we'll hear from a number of scholars about their response to the book before concluding with Wenger's response. Our first review is from Bradley Kime, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. He is working on a history of wealth transfers, secular governance, and religious undue influence. 

Bradley Kime

If I was stuck on a desert island and could only read one book on American religious freedom, this would probably be it. Rather than quantifying religious freedom’s realization—as if we already know what (religious) freedom is—Tisa Wenger investigates the politics of its historic invocations: “who appealed to religious freedom, for what purposes, and what it meant to them” (1). This is an increasingly familiar and important move. Wenger extends it to the relatively understudied decades between the Spanish-Cuban-Filipino-American War and World War II. She finds that invocations of religious freedom were integral to processes of racialization and colonial governance.

Wenger unpacks this finding with a brilliant, flowing, complex, sustained analysis of the “civilizational assemblages of empire” that have informed “cultural meanings of religious freedom” and vice versa. In the work of Alexander Weheliye, Jasbir Puar, and others, “assemblages” include intersecting, interlocking, and constantly reconfigured ideological/institutional formations of race, gender, sexuality, class, religion, humanity, and civilization. Wenger uses the concept to show how “religious freedom talk” has obscured contested distributions of material resources and helped justify, extend, and manage racial empire. For example, by assembling and opposing male Anglo-Protestant modernity and female Spanish-Catholic barbarism, American imperialists justified their seizure of the Philippines: the problem there was not general Spanish imperial oppression but church-state collusion; the American intervention was not more empire under new management but, rather, the establishment of religious freedom. Subsequently, the same civilizational assemblages cast Filipinos as racially unfit to actually exercise religious freedom, and provided categories for their suppression and control. Meanwhile, the imposition of religious freedom in the southern Islands, incrementally and opaquely codified, effectively eliminated Moro political sovereignty by sequestering the power of indigenous leaders within a protected ecclesiastical sphere. 

As in her first book, Wenger also shows how the marginalized and colonized have reconfigured and redeployed religious freedom and its attendant civilizational assemblages in their fights for sovereignty. For example, pan-Indian Shakers and Peyotists secured some measure of contingent self-determination by incorporating churches. Strategic victories like these lead Wenger to conclude that the ideal of religious freedom has no historically necessary or intrinsic conceptual limits, even as she keeps tabs on the internal and external costs such victories entailed. Internal costs included various fissions and foreclosures of collective life—Filipino ecclesiology, Moro political economy, Native American pneumatology, Jewish peoplehood, UNIA pan-Africanism, etc.—necessitated by negotiations of dominant conceptions of religion and adaptations of secular-religious divisions. External costs came—in ways that reminded me of Sylvester Johnson’s work—when the marginalized and colonized became agents of empire themselves: American Catholics claiming the benefits of white religion by participating in the colonization of Filipinos; Filipinos by subordinating Moros; Jews by reinforcing black-white boundaries; black Protestants by colonizing/missionizing Haitians, Liberians, and South Africans; pan-Indian Shakers by denigrating the Ghost Dance; the Nation of Islam by denigrating “voodoo,” and so on.

I recently finished reading for comprehensive exams. One of my reading lists was a small slice of literature on religion and law, in which the emancipatory limits and/or possibilities of religious freedom were organizing questions. These questions have a historical register. How determinative are past and present abuses of religious freedom for present and future uses? They also have a conceptual register. What kinds of puzzles does religious freedom pose? And to what degree are such puzzles intrinsic to any project of religious freedom, or constitutive of any regime of religious freedom? Celebratory accounts aside, some seem to say that the historical and conceptual problems are myriad and profound but, short of fulfilling fantasies of unconditioned freedom from others, you/we can do what you/we want with the malleable rhetoric of religious freedom. Others argue that the problems are unsolvable, self-perpetuating; that religious freedom has always produced what has putatively required its interventions; that it inevitably defers and displaces its inherent contradictions onto those it excludes. Others take up mediating positions: declarations of religious freedom open real possibilities for adaptation and localized liberation, but these possibilities, even in the future, are not unlimited.

I might be wrong to read these positions against each other, but some, including Wenger, do seem more positive than others about the possibilities of religious freedom, despite a deep reckoning with its dark American history. Wenger says the possibilities of religious freedom are not “contained by its history or the apparent logic of its significations,” only by our political imaginations (239). In other words, a religious freedom that defines religion without limiting it, and protects religion without privileging it, can be imagined and implemented toward an emancipatory future. As of this writing, I’m still drawn to arguments for replacing the ideal of religious freedom altogether, but Wenger’s book is a brilliant call to employ, rather than evade, religion’s capacity to capture our collectivity and organize it differently.

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The Reformation as a Psychological Event: Celebrating the 500th Anniversary of the Reformation with Erich Fromm

Peter Cajka

The new release tables at Hodges Figgis – a three-story bookstore in downtown Dublin – greet frequent shoppers like me with a spate of fresh books on Luther, Reformation historiography, Calvin, and the Counter Reformation. As we mark the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, it may be useful to consider how the event gets interpreted by thinkers unconstrained by the rules of academic history. Modern thinkers, for or against, Protestant or Catholic, have never shied away from discerning the Reformation’s deeper meanings. A guest at a dinner party I attended a few months ago (we wondered briefly into a conversation on religion) called the Reformation “the first human rights movement in history.”

Erich Fromm, a psychoanalyst with ties to the Frankfurt School, pursues a much bleaker interpretation of the Reformation in Escape from Freedom, a book he published in 1941. The Renaissance and the rise of the market economy broke down the medieval world, began his argument, liberating men and women from social ties. “The individual was left alone and isolated,” Fromm wrote, “he was free.” Freshly aware of their individuality, Fromm argued that Luther and Calvin offered millions of people (in the middle and lower classes) an escape from this freedom. Calvin and Luther, consciously and unconsciously, encouraged followers to relinquish the self to a completely sovereign God. “Protestantism was the answer to the human needs of the frightened, uprooted, and isolated individual who had to orient and to relate himself to a new world,” Fromm grimly concludes.

Luther, according to Fromm, preached freedom by way of realizing one’s ultimate insignificance. If the individual accepts that only God grants a capacity for faith – God might be willing to grant such a person the gift of faith. This version of Luther, Fromm conceded, did encourage individuals to seek freedom: men and women should be free of the binding authority of the church. But this freedom creates an anxiety that can only be assuaged by the individual admitting their own powerlessness. The freedom provided by the end of the medieval order was a condition to be escaped. Fromm’s Luther “teaches that we should humiliate ourselves and that this very self-humiliation is the means to reliance on God’s strength” and this Luther “preaches that the individual should not feel that he is his own master.” The individual Protestant escaped freedom at the end of the day by handing possession of the self over to God. You can interpret the bible for yourself endlessly but only God grants the faith required to achieve salvation.

Calvin’s theology also diminished the anxiety of the individual by providing a flight from freedom. His doctrine of predestination held that individuals could have a new sense of security in a deracinated society with an act of complete submission. If one admitted that God had decided upon the saved and the damned, the individual relinquished his or her ability to achieve salvation by way of works, but gained the confidence of belonging to a religious group among the saved. Predestination then breathed life into a particular pathology: “the development of a frantic activity and a striving to do something,” as Fromm put it. To be assured of salvation or damnation – and assuage the anxiety of individuality – one went to work. With earthly success one granted oneself a sign of his or her salvation, and without it, one could forecast damnation. Anxiety dwindles as the fate of the soul becomes apparent. Salvation is not your hands. For Fromm, a sovereign God made the decision for the individual who had unburdened himself or herself of freedom.

Fromm’s thesis in Escape from Freedom raises questions about how and why particular religious doctrines take off in a certain historical moment. For Fromm, theologies are products of social and psychological needs. In other words, the ideas of Luther and Calvin did not appeal because of their acumen and rigor, but because these doctrines are rooted in what Fromm called the “powerful needs of personality.” The early reformation personality, in light of having been emancipated from the church and the social ties of the medieval world, craved assurance. They were eager to hand their freedom over to God (Luther’s God granted faith; Calvin’s God had already decided on the individual’s salvation). Fromm contends that while Luther and Calvin did not express such an argument consciously, such an assertion lurked unconsciously in their prose. “Although [Luther] consciously thinks in terms of the voluntary and loving character of his ‘submission to God,” Fromm wrote, “he is pervaded by a feeling of powerlessness and wickedness that makes the nature of his relationship to God one of submission.” Fromm interpreted the Reformation as a socio-psychological event. I only wish, for the sake of impolite and exciting dinner conversation, that I had given my acquaintance a taste of Fromm’s interpretation of the Reformation.


Escape from Freedom, 99.
Ibid., 101.
Ibid., 84.
Ibid., 91.
Ibid., 64.
Ibid., 68.

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Police and American Religions

Charles McCrary

How can scholars of American religion incorporate police and policing into our narratives? I have been kicking around this question for a while, and I have a few very preliminary ideas and suggestions. In recent years the field of American religious studies has continued to expand the purview of what counts as data. So, I doubt many readers would say that police and policing do not fit within our narratives. But the question remains—as it does with so many other topics—how to bridge these questions and data sets with our existing frameworks and narratives. What follows are some disorganized thoughts about what a sustained conversation about police and religion might look like.

Scholars often study the police within the context of surveillance studies. Foucault’s ideas about policing have of course been influential here. I recommend Andrew Johnson’s piece on Foucault, the police, and neoliberalism. Johnson shows how Foucault moved from understanding the police as a state institution “isomorphic with the prison, both employing disciplinary techniques to control a free population and part of a carceral continuum” (5) in Discipline and Punish to, in the Security, Territory, Population lectures, “a ‘secret history of the police’ where greater attention is paid to public health, social welfare and regulating the marketplace than investigating and arresting criminals” (6). We can see how this tracks with the shift toward governmentality. This is one of a number of ways we can uncover the pervasive power of policing, though I wonder if an overly expansive definition of “police,” while probably advancing fruitful lines of analysis, might also distract from efforts to incorporate new characters into our narratives.

Many scholars of American religion have turned their attention recently to surveillance and related topics like intelligence and security. Sylvester Johnson and Steven Weitzman’s new edited collection The FBI and Religion: Faith and National Security before and after 9/11 offers various perspectives and case studies related to the FBI, and a number of scholars (some of whom are included in the volume) are at work on forthcoming projects related to the FBI and other agencies of domestic surveillance and intelligence. For a long time, scholars of new religious movements have studied the FBI, ATF, and other agencies, particularly in light of their violent encounters with NRMs. Also, scholars have studied American Muslims after 9/11 and, more recently, in light of targeted bans and rising Islamophobia (including anti-sharia legislation, for example). I’m particularly interested in how more attention to “religio-racial identity” might help us study the role of religion in the surveillance of racialized bodies (I have in mind here Simone Browne’s Dark Matters, especially the chapter on the TSA). Surveillance and intelligence gathering are of course not only domestic security practices, but that the United States and other imperial states have often used religion as a category of (colonial) governance, as a way to understand, control, and influence populations. With these questions in mind, scholars like Mike Graziano have turned our attention to the OSS and CIA and their uses for “religion” (and academically produced discourse on “world religions”). All of this is great work, and it certainly contributes to whatever nascent discussion we might organize around “religion and police.” The line between police and military is becoming ever hazier, but, still, what about local police and sheriff departments?

A few years ago, over at the U.S. Intellectual History blog, Tim Lacy opened a discussion on intellectual history and policing. He posted some great questions and garnered lots of helpful response and reading suggestions. I wonder how scholars of American religion can locate religion in these conversations, as we have done in, say, the history of prisons (see, e.g., here, here, here, and here). Jenna Gray-Hildenbrand’s dissertation focuses on “criminalization” and offers what she calls a “defendant-centered” account of religious freedom. Building on that, I wonder what stories of American religious life and freedom we might tell that focus on the perspectives and voices of arrestees, targets of state surveillance, and criminals. How do religious ideas and practices factor into people’s interactions with the police? What roles have religions played in police reform, or in philosophies of policing, or in movements against police brutality? Of course, both police and religion are central to many narratives of the civil rights movement. What about, say, Bull Connor’s religion? More generally, what about the religion of police? I can imagine a study, for example, about the religious composition of a certain precinct, its citizens and officers. What happens when there are religious differences between an officer and citizen? Are there instances of, say, a predominantly Protestant police department in a mostly Catholic neighborhood? How might be study that? Were there police officers in 1880s Mormon Utah? Were there any trends or correlations regarding the types of roles officers played in the church? What might religion scholars say about subcultures of police spouses? Who makes and buys these pieces of material culture?

One final thought. Is the study of American religion and policing—if we are to develop a conversation organized under this label—falling prey to the “religion and x” formula, which, linking two things by a limp conjunction, often fails to unsettle or interrogate either category? What is important, foundational, about religion here? What I have in mind is thinking through secularism studies about “religion” as a category of secular governance. Scholars of American religious freedom have focused on courts quite a lot, and they’ve posed and answered interesting and important questions. Can we apply some of these ideas to police? What can we say about religious freedom in the context of a police raid on a religious community? Sometimes these issues are litigated later on, in a First-Amendment case, where we often encounter them. In many encounters between the secular state and religion, though, there is no planning or later arguments or careful consideration of religious freedom. Take this example from last summer. While protesting Donald Trump, who was speaking nearby, Josie Valadez Fraire was arrested for burning sage (see the video here). As the officers attempt to take away the sage and the crowd chants “Let her go,” Fraire says, “This is indigenous spirituality. You are not allowed.” They took it away and arrested her anyway. This was not the end of the incident, of course (see more here), but it was the initial encounter. What is the context for this encounter? Focusing on police, are these police officers trained to understand the politics of religious freedom, indigenous rights, and the thorny definitional issues at work? Or the legacies and contemporary realities of colonialism and anti-colonialism that produced those laws? Probably not, but nevertheless, the police officers could either let Fraire smudge or not. This is the secular state operating at a micro-level, not with planned arguments in court, but in a street with a few historically located people acting quickly. Secularism happens there, too.

There is a lot more we could say about this, but I’ll leave off with a few questions. First, should there be a more sustained conversation, and venues for that conversation, within the field of American religions? Second, if so, what would that look like? What are the central questions a focus on police could help us articulate about American religion? And, the flipside of that, what questions are we already asking that attention to police might help us answer better? Third, what role should police and policing play in secularism studies, particularly with regard to religious freedom? And, fourth, which works in American religion already discuss police, and how might we place them in conversation with each other?

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