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Autobiographical narratives and related materials such as journals and diaries have proved to be valuable, but often problematic, resources for the studying and teaching of African American religious experiences. This chapter identifies a number of these resources and illustrates some of the historiographical and pedagogical issues related to their use. In this chapter, “testifying” alludes to the confessional tradition within the black religious experience and is used in reference to the “subjective” self-representations, interpretations, and experiences found in autobiographical narratives and related materials. “Testimony”, meanwhile, has more “factual” connotations and refers to resources and interpretations that are ostensibly more “objective” and hence subject to critical historical assessment. Both types of material are presented as valid, valuable, and complementary resources for studying the African American religious experience. This chapter also includes pedagogical reflections on varied classroom experiences that incorporate both types of resources in courses situated in two university departments of religious studies.

This chapter introduces four teaching strategies that emerge from the characteristics of a triple-heritage model of Christian education that is grounded in the African American spirituals. The model consists of the following: communal, creative, critical, and cooperative. The teaching strategies that emerge from these characteristics include communal dialogue, creative engagement, critical reflection, and cooperative action. The chapter then discusses various aspects of a course called “Christian Education in the African American Experience” and details how these strategies have shaped and informed the teaching of the course. The primary purpose of this chapter is to examine the teaching/learning process that emerges throughout the course.

This chapter discusses the text, Tribal Talk. Topics covered include Black theology, the use of broken English in the narrative, hermeneutics, African-derived religions in the Americas, and African-American religious history.

Here this chapter engages the work of Albert Raboteau, the elder statesman of contemporary African American religious history, particularly his early work, Slave Religion (1978). The ambiguity of this text, which is emblematic of the field, lies in its impression that black religion generally and Afro‐Christianity particularly is a reflex of race, an (essentialist) echo of “Africanity” or “blackness” itself. Thus, black cultural nationalism is at the root of black religion. However, such a reading of black faith only lodges it within, rather than seeing it as trying to disrupt, modernity's racial imagination.The chapter then reexamine Raboteau's early work in light of his post‐Slave Religion work, inspired as it is by icon theology. Raboteau can now historically call attention to how Afro‐Christianity disrupts the racial gaze. The book later refines and presses Raboteau's fledgling and sketchy insights in a theologically robust direction.

This chapter focuses on the question of how a course on the history of American Catholicism might be framed for a non-Catholic, Protestant, and Southern context. The author of this book has developed an entirely new course, “Histories of American Catholicism”, which strives to address diversity by problematizing American Catholic identity. This chapter discusses several methodological issues with a particular focus on how they have shaped the author's thinking about how to teach this course. Since the course has not yet been taught in either a Catholic or a non-Catholic context, this chapter is a working proposal that offers a preliminary road map. It will require adjustment as it is tested out.

This chapter considers efforts to legislate Native American religious freedom in the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (AIRFA, 1978). Where courts and even common sense have seen AIRFA as a religious freedom statute—as an extension of the legal protections of the First Amendment into the distinctive terrain of Native American traditions—the chapter suggests a different view. If the legal force of “religious freedom” discourse has been only dimly effective for Native sacred claims in courts, this chapter is the one that most pointedly shows how Native peoples drew on the rhetorical power of the sacred and religious freedom to win significant legislative protections specific to Native peoples. It does so through interviews with Suzan Shown Harjo. These interviews show how the remarkable legislative accomplishment of AIRFA and, later, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990), carry the rhetorical force of religious freedom into the legal shape of federal Indian law, with its recognition of treaty-based collective rights and the United States' nation-to-nation relationship with Native peoples.

This chapter examines leading figures and institutions of the Religious Right in the United States and the distinctive narrative form its public and political activism has taken from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the present: namely, the jeremiad. The resurgence of publicly assertive religion has become the subject of intense scholarly scrutiny and the source of much political concern. Social scientists and policymakers have long presumed that as the world modernized it would inevitably secularize. The political ascendancy of the Religious Right in the United States and, more recently, the consequential militancy of radical Islamism confounds conventional wisdom of inevitable secularization. The chapter closes with a cursory comparison of the jeremiad with the jihad, the distinctive narrative form of radical Islamism, which reveals that despite strong rhetorical similarities between them, crucial differences persist in their political effects. Moreover, such a comparison reveals an important irony: just as the specter of resurgent religion has been undermining the longstanding academic confidence in the self‐evident inevitability of secularization, the perceived threat of secularization has been busy mobilizing the faithful both at home and abroad.

This chapter describes another important trend involving religion, liberalism, and conservatism. Actively religious Americans are more politically and socially conservative than less religious Americans. Regular churchgoing, moreover, now correlates even more strongly with some types of political and social conservatism than it did several decades ago. Rather than being associated with a particular type of religion, certain kinds of political and social conservatism have become more tightly linked to religiosity itself. As such, the most and least religiously active people are further apart attitudinally than they were several decades ago, but this trend does not yet warrant a declaration of culture war.

The changes that took place in American religious life during the late twentieth century were, in some important respects, unprecedented. As the U.S. became hospitable to virtually all the religions of the world, more religious switching and experimenting occurred than ever before. In other respects, the enthusiasm for spirituality in this period was similar to previous Great Awakenings that have marked American religious history in the past. This concluding chapter compares the transformation of American religion in the late twentieth century to previous awakenings, suggesting that the impetus to spiritual expansion can be traced back through the American Transcendentalists to the New England Puritans and their influential role in shaping American culture.

The United States increasingly perceives itself as a multireligious society. The Introduction describes the changing American religious landscape and its implications for local Christians. Two major social trends have contributed to this new religious diversity in the United States: increased immigration and interest in “alternative” or “new” religions. Individuals and groups featured in this book have responded to religious diversity in a variety of ways and out of deliberate Christian conviction. Their experiences can prompt readers to act with the same deliberate conviction. The Introduction includes the perspectives of the Council for a Parliament of the World's Religions, the Southern Baptist Convention, and the Assemblies of God. The question of religious truth is broached here and recurs throughout the book.

This concluding chapter gives a nod in the direction of successful negotiated settlements and other agreements that grab fewer headlines and leave fewer public traces because they can avoid the courts altogether and proceed in the context of the nation-to-nation relationship. For an example, it turns to the newly created and recently embattled Bears Ears National Monument, a collaboratively managed preserve of sacred lands, cultural landscapes, and traditional knowledge in southern Utah. Since the quiet goal for most Native people is to protect what is sacred to them without calling attention to themselves, the best outcomes for Native American religious freedom are so far beyond the First Amendment and its legal counterparts, they can remain entirely off line. Here, the story of Bears Ears is less the story of the Obama administration than it is the story of decades of activism and the concerted strategic efforts of a consortium of Native nations. When President Barack Obama designated 1.35 million acres of southeast Utah lands as Bears Ears National Monument, he authorized a new experiment in cooperation, even collaboration, between the United States and Native nations in safeguarding sacred lands.

Chapter 1 examines how important stylistic changes in jazz’s sounds and musical practices, which influenced the reception of swing and bebop, helped to shape the construction of African American religious internationalism in black Christianity and Islam. It presents the journey of Malcolm Little as a swing jazz dancer and a practitioner of Garveyism as a case study of the themes of social justice and black representations of masculinities that jazz and Islam shared. Chapter 1 also discusses his first encounters with Islam, which took place when he studied the religion with Malcolm “Shorty” Jarvis and a missionary from the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community in Boston.

The introduction discusses how the religious approach to intelligence was entwined with the study of “world religions” in the nation’s universities as well as a renewed focus on religious pluralism in the broader culture. By the 1950s, American popular attitudes toward the world’s religions increasingly assumed that all religions (simply by virtue of being “religions”) were functionally similar. This echoed the “world religions paradigm” (WRP) then becoming prominent in the academy. The WRP understood global religious systems as roughly analogous to one another and interchangeable in terms of function and purpose, on account of sharing a common essence. This idea appealed to intelligence officers in part because it suggested that religious meaning was universally translatable across otherwise stark divides of language, culture, and ethnicity. In incorporating this idea into their work, American intelligence officers took their belief systems and certainties local to the United States and projected them outward around the globe.

This chapter examines the broad religious, cultural, political, and international setting of the early Cold War. Beginning with larger cultural forces in the years preceding American intervention in Vietnam, the origins of the deep ideological and philosophical divisions that emerged during and after the Vietnam War are made clear. In the 1940s and 1950s, conflicts between two predominant sectors of American religious culture—one conservative and evangelical, the other with a liberal-progressive bent—simmered just below the surface and sometimes boiled over. Usually, though, the tropes of religious consensus and civil religion provided Americans a common language through which to understand diverse religious and political ideas, but these ties were insufficient to mask deep divisions that would fracture American communities during the Vietnam War.

This chapter explores how chaplains' positions as people in the middle allowed them to address a wide variety of audiences to offer experientially grounded analysis of the Vietnam War but also situated them as living symbols of a long-standing philosophical debate about the proper role of chaplains in war and a policy-oriented discussion about civilianizing the military chaplaincy. While the debate over chaplains never dominated, or even became central to, debates about the Vietnam War, it was indicative of theological and doctrinal fissures within the American religious community.

The archival model of Undergraduate Research in the discipline focuses on the categorization and classification of information obtained in manuscript and document collections. In particular, it describes the archival model in the study of Native American religious practices.