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.

Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington (1899–1974) emerged within the jazz profession as a prominent exponent of Harlem Renaissance racial uplift ideals about incorporating African American culture into artistic production. Formed in the early twentieth century's middle-class black Protestant culture but not a churchgoer in adulthood, Ellington conveyed a nostalgic appreciation of African American Christianity whenever hewrote music to chronicle African American history. This prominent jazz musician's religious nostalgia resulted in compositions that conveyed to a broader American audience a portrait of African American religiosity that was constantly “classical” and static—not quite primitive, but never appreciated as a modern aspect of black culture.

This article examines several Ellington compositions from the late 1920s through the 1960s that exemplify his deployment of popular representations of African American religious belief and practice. Through the short film Black and Tan in the 1920s, the satirical popular song “Is That Religion?” in the 1930s, the long-form symphonic movement Black, Brown and Beige in the 1940s, the lyricism of “Come Sunday” in the 1950s, and the dramatic prose of “My People” in the 1960s, Ellington attempted to capture a portrait of black religious practice without recognition of contemporaneous developments in black Protestant Christianity in the twentieth century's middle decades. Although existing Ellington scholarship has covered his “Sacred Concerts” in the 1960s and 1970s, this article engages themes and representations in Ellington's work prefiguring the religious jazz that became popular with white liberal Protestants in America and Europe. This discussion of religious narratives in Ellington's compositions affords an opportunity to reflect upon the (un)intended consequences of progressive, sympathetic cultural production, particularly on the part of prominent African American historical figures in their time. Moreover, this article attempts to locate the jazz profession as a critical site for the examination of racial and religious representation in African American religious history.

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.

As founder of a religious movement emphasizing soteriological goals, Paramahansa Yogananda is at odds with the prevailing scholarly portrayal of yoga as a modern, syncretic bodily practice focused on mindfulness and physical well-being that, even when employing language of transcendence, magic, or the supernatural, typically has this-worldly perfection in mind. Yogananda, thus, offers an important counterpoint to the dominant historiography of yoga. Whereas more recent “global gurus” often remained in India and recruited among diaspora Indians, Yogananda was the first Indian to establish a thriving yoga-based Hinduism among white converts in the United States. He worked to make his message compelling in the often-hostile milieu of a dominant Christian culture. In this article, I consider Southern California's identity as a “spiritual frontier” that offered a uniquely conducive space to launch a Hindu religious movement in a virulently xenophobic era. I explore Yogananda's vision of the “science of religion,” language that reflected not a materialist reduction of yoga to somatic goals, but a precise, systematic meditation method designed to achieve God-contact. Yogananda offered various products in an effort to build brand loyalty for his yoga-based religion. Although he strategically promoted the very real health and energy benefits of his instruction, the heart of his commercial and spiritual enterprise was a yoga correspondence course that promised to train disciples in a devotional relationship with a God he often depicted as a personal Being. I conclude by examining Yogananda's role as the authoritative divine guru who mediated his religious products to devotees and remained present after his death to guide them toward ultimate bliss.

Historians have posited several theories in an attempt to explain what many regard as Martin Luther King, Jr.'s radical departure, in the late 1960's, from his earlier, liberal framing of civil rights reform. Rather than view his increasingly critical statements against the Vietnam War and the liberal establishment as evidence of a fundamental change in his thinking, a number of scholars have braided the continuity of King's thought within frameworks of democratic socialism and the long civil rights movement, respectively. King's lifelong struggle for racial justice in America, they argue, was rife with broader and more radical implications than that of a national campaign for political inclusion. His message was global, and it was revolutionary. However, when depicting him exclusively in the context of black radicals during “the long civil rights movement,“ or the labor movement, these scholars have a tendency to downplay the most fundamental component of King's activism - his religion. More so than he referenced the brave black leaders of previous civil rights campaigns, King drew upon the writings and ideas of social gospel thinkers, such as Walter Rauschenbusch and Reinhold Niebuhr. By analyzing King within the context of “the long social gospel movement” in addition to “the long civil rights movement,” we can explain his radical social mission in terms of race and class, but without marginalizing the Christian values at the core of his calling.

Since the publication fifty years ago of Robert N. Bellah's classic article “Civil Religion in America,” the concept of civil religion has provoked continuing debates among scholars who study religion and American culture. This essay is a contribution to these debates and an attempt to move beyond them. It considers American civil religion as theory and as practice, examining its meaning through an investigation of how it functioned at an important and too little studied point in its past. Arguing that civil religion is both a cultural and a political construct, it shows how at the close of World War I, a loosely linked network of civic, military, and patriotic groups came together to create a sacralized form of patriotic nationalism and incorporate it into the American civil religious tradition. Contending that the relationships between civil religion and more conventional forms of organized religion are often close and at times contentious, it examines how religious bodies of the time were instrumental in supporting this process and intractable in resisting it. Proposing that civil religion can come in a variety of sometimes competing versions, it discusses the conflicts over civil religious practices that ensued within American churches during the next decade, relying on reports from the time to describe how these conflicts divided church leaders, denominations, and congregations. Finally, working from the premise that civil religious beliefs, symbols, and rituals are invariably involved in the political process, it examines how they became increasingly used for partisan purposes over the course of the decade, raising issues about the relationship between church and state. In closing, it comments on the enduring character of civil religion, and speculates on its continuing importance for American religion and politics.

This article examines how religious minorities (specifically, marginalized Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and Muslims) have participated in government-affiliated service programs as part of attempts to assert claims to faith in a common God, observance of common ethics, and belonging in a common body politic. Historians have described World War II as—thanks to the interreligious military—a time of enshrining “Judeo-Christian” narratives in culture, legislation, and politics, and of allowing Jews greater access to these arenas than they had experienced previously. While military service is also important here, my primary subject is the service religious groups initially offered as a compliment to military activity but then expanded and generalized—often under government commission—into community care work that relieved the state of the economic burden of supplying certain citizenship benefits or that gave international endeavors a friendlier face. Marginalized white Protestants were the first to offer such services, but other minoritized religious groups followed their example, patriotically echoing military themes throughout the twentieth century when creating “service” organizations and volunteer “corps.” While many contemporary Muslim American leaders believe that community service engagements will help Muslims overcome discrimination by demonstrating that they also make vital contributions to the U.S., several current factors call that possibility into question—not least of which is the history of only partial acceptance earlier religious minorities enjoyed as a result of their efforts.

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 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.