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.

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.

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.

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.

Clergy sexual violence in immigrant communities is an understudied dimension of the sexual abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic church. Yet records suggest that bishops regularly treated immigrant-serving parishes as dumping grounds for serially abusive clergy. There, evidence suggests, abusers targeted minors from poor, vulnerable, and undocumented families, silencing victims with threats of deportation and further violence. How did legal status intersect with structures of state and ecclesial power and with social hierarchies of visibility in situations of clergy abuse? Centering the case of Msgr. Peter E. Garcia, a priest in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles who abused at least twenty boys between 1966 and 1987, this article examines archival evidence from unsealed clergy personnel files to interrogate the complex politics of documentation in the case. It attends to the relationship between three interwoven forms of (un)documentation: first, the precarious legal and social status of victims; second, the silences, redactions, and euphemisms that characterize church records containing these accounts; and third, the spatial undocumentation at work in the use of migrant parishes as clergy dumping grounds. It demonstrates how a post–Vatican II theological and pastoral imagination of intimacy with the poor, refracted through prisms of state, ecclesial, and clerical dominance, helped to create conditions for the production of invisible victims. The erasure accomplished through the overlapping forms of undocumentation in the Garcia case, it argues, can help to account for the absence of such stories from the broader narrative of Catholic clergy sexual abuse in the United States.

This article addresses a pervasive historiographic assumption about the supremacy of the King James Bible in British North America by proposing that a process we call the “pluralization of Scriptures” forced colonial Protestants to square their belief in “the Bible” with the undeniable reality of many “bibles.” While the KJV remained dominant among anglophone Protestant populations, by the early eighteenth century some heirs of New England Puritanism were challenging its adequacy and pushing for improved translations of key passages, as members of the clerical intelligentsia became immersed in cutting-edge textual and historical scholarship. Also, during the eighteenth century, non-English cultures of biblicism with their own religious print markets formed in the middle colonies, most importantly among diasporic communities of German Protestants, who brought the Luther Bible to America, and diverse “heterodox” Bibles associated with radical Pietist groups. This essay contends that, well before the American Revolution, the advent of Higher Criticism in American seminaries, and the first wave of English-language Bible production in the early republic, Scripture had ceased to be a static, monolithic entity. A considerable number of alternative translations and commentary traditions in a variety of different languages came to co-exist and, at some points, also interact with each other. Moreover, we argue that competing translations, even of passages speaking to core Christian doctrines, were inextricably bound up with some of the most significant controversies among colonial Protestants, such as the debate over the doctrine of universal salvation, our main case study.

As an amorphous, nonhierarchical collection of associations, evangelicalism has always lacked a clear source of authority. Since Christianity Today's beginning in 1956, it has aspired to serve as the mouthpiece of authoritative evangelical views, presenting itself as the voice of moderation while espousing conservative views with a combative, culture-war stance. With the emergence of the gay rights movement, evangelicals launched a culture war against “homosexuals” as the implicitly secular, liberal Other and then were forced to wrestle with how to apply this stance toward their gay Christian brothers and sisters. Evangelicals' self-conception led to a contradictory stance that they managed to maintain with little variation for decades. Committed to biblical inerrancy, they were definitive in condemning gay sexual behavior, but as self-identified postfundamentalists, they also desired to be compassionate toward gay people. They encouraged gay Christians to change their sexual orientation and simultaneously admitted that such change was impossible for most. Though evangelicals were slow to welcome the ex-gay movement, they eventually embraced it fully as the only plausible escape from their contradictory ideology. The collapse of the movement thus came as a major blow. Many evangelicals began to question the premise that sexual orientation was a chosen, changeable identity and began to rethink the theology of inerrancy that undergirded evangelical hermeneutics. Since 2010, a number of evangelical leaders have challenged CT's claim to represent the evangelical consensus on the issue. In the coming years, the progressive views of younger evangelicals will undoubtedly increase acceptance of same-sex relationships.

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.

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.