The history of U.S. religion in the long 20th century (1890s forward) is flourishing as of late, in part because of scholars’ efforts to ground their story in the gritty and messy realities of “secular” spaces, realms outside the pulpit, pew, and seminary classroom once deemed tangential by traditional church historians. Though respectful of developments within overtly sacred spheres, new religious historians have worked to broaden and enrich their renderings of this country’s religious past by applying new methodologies of “lived religion,” pursuing new types of primary source bases (from bottom-up accounts of labor activism to top-down records of corporate power), and applying fresh lines of questioning that dovetail with fresh thinking in other areas of American history. The results of this effort are striking and sure to be long lasting, not just for the study of religion in U.S. history but also for historical treatment of politics and popular culture, diplomacy, capitalism, race, gender, and myriad impulses that have worked (and continue to work) in and on American history through time. This course provides both a chronological and thematic overview of religion and the politics of place in modern America. While moving sequentially through time, pausing to assess transformative moments in U.S. religion and its broader political contexts, the course will focus on particular locations – physical, social, ideological – in which this pattern of development unfolds. Students will, in this sense, be asked to read, digest, and assess recently published and highly influential books that place religion at the center of dramatic and contested, but also quiet and subtle, social spaces in which the meanings of faith and its role in society is challenged or altered by the encounter, and form which religion emerges with renewed urgency, vigor, and determination to revolutionize or reform its surroundings.
