Founded in 1963 at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the Muslim Students Association of the United States and Canada (MSA) expanded to 116 local chapters by 1968, with members representing more than forty countries. During the Cold War, the MSA embraced the project of daʿwa, or renewing and correcting other Muslims’ devotional practice, and improving the public image of Islam. Extant scholarship on the MSA portrays the organization as ambivalent, if not antagonistic, toward U.S. society during the Cold War because it was deeply enmeshed in the political and religious ideologies associated with the global Islamic Revival. This article offers a different view by examining female-authored writings published under the auspices of the MSA Women's Committee between 1963 and 1980. Aspirational in scope and pedagogical in approach, MSA women's literature shifts conceptions of the MSA's political and religious priorities during this period, from one of detachment to one of selective engagement with American culture. This article makes three main interventions. First, it demonstrates that a focus on the publications of MSA female members yields a more robust understanding of how this important group of American Muslims envisioned daʿwa as a local and global project of religious revival during the Cold War. Second, it shows that, to achieve their revivalist aims, female MSA members identified points of affinity with certain religious non-Muslim Americans, namely, upwardly mobile Christians and Jews. For these authors, the ground on which they found affinity with families of other faiths was not theology or Abrahamic lineage but, rather, a shared gendered and classed vision of raising devout children to meet the unique threats posed by modernity. Finally, this article examines how female MSA authors conceived of the patriarchally organized yet maternally driven nuclear family as essential for reinvigorating Muslim practice.

In the wake of the Civil War, Father Isaac Hecker launched several publishing ventures to advance his dream of a Catholic America, but he and his partners soon found themselves embroiled in a debate with other American Catholics, notably his friend and fellow convert Orestes Brownson, over the “use and abuse of reading.” Although the debate was certainly part of a contemporary conversation about the compatibility of Catholicism and American culture, this essay argues that it was equally rooted in a moment of American anxiety over a shifting social order, a moment when antebellum faith in the individual was being tested by the rights claims of women and Americans of color. Tacitly accepting and internalizing historical claims of intrinsic and through-going Catholic “difference,” claims offered both by American Protestants and American Catholics like Brownson, scholars often presume that debates within American Catholicism reflect “Catholic” concerns first and foremost, qualifying their utility as sources of “American” cultural history. By examining American Catholic discussions of reading, individual liberty, social order, and gender in the 1860s and 1870s, this essay argues that Brownson's arguments against the compatibility of American and Catholic life were in fact far more representative of ascendant ideas in American culture than Hecker's hopeful visions of a Catholic American future made manifest through the power of reading. In doing so, it demonstrates the ways that American Catholicism can be a valuable and complex site for studying the broader history of religion and culture in the United States.

This article traces negotiations over the epistemic, ethical, and political authority of Judaism, Protestantism, Catholicism, and science in mid-twentieth-century America. Specifically, it examines how the president of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Rabbi Dr. Louis Finkelstein, led a diverse group of intellectual elites as they planned and convened the 1940 Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life (CSPR). Based on the conference's transcripts, proceedings, and papers, in addition to Finkelstein's writings from the period, this article shows how Finkelstein used his vision of the Jewish tradition as a model to form a pluralistic intellectual space that brought together the representatives of multiple religious traditions and modern science. To accredit the American way of life to Judaism, Finkelstein traced America's ethical values, democratic politics, and scientific genius back to the Hebrew Prophets through Rabbinic Judaism. In response to Finkelstein's historiography and the political and ideological challenges of World War II, scientific and religious experts negotiated their authority and debated how to mobilize their traditions in a quest for political stability. By analyzing the CSPR as a meeting of multiple discourses, this article reinstates science as a fundamental player in the story of American pluralism and demonstrates the way a non-Protestant tradition shaped the terms of an elite public's understanding of the “democratic way of life.”

This article uses the case of Kaufmann Kohler (1843–1926), an intellectual and institutional leader of American Reform Judaism, to explore the relationship between Orientalism and the category of religion in nineteenth-century America. Recent scholarship has shown that the lived religion of nineteenth-century American Jews departs significantly from the ideological hopes of Jewish elites. Connecting the emerging portrait of nineteenth-century Jewish laity with elite arguments for American Judaism, I reconsider Kohler's thought as a theological project out of step with his socioreligious milieu. Kohler is renowned for his theorizing of Judaism as a universal, ethical religion. As scholars have demonstrated repeatedly, defining Judaism as a “religion” was an important feature of Reform thought. What these accounts have insufficiently theorized, however, is the political context that ties the categorization of religion to the history of Orientalism that organized so many late nineteenth-century discussions of religion, Jewish and not. Drawing on work by Tracy Fessenden, John Modern, and Tisa Wenger, I show that Kohler's universal, cosmopolitan religion is a Jewish version of the Protestant secular. Like these Protestant modernists, Kohler defines Reform Judaism as a religion that supersedes an atavistic tribalism bound to materiality and ritual law. Being Jewish, for Kohler, means being civilized; reforming the soul of Judaism goes together with civilizing Jewish bodies and creating a Judaism that could civilize the world in an era in which religion and imperialism were overlapping interpretive projects with racial and gendered entanglements.

This article examines the spirituality reflected in the 1976 cookbook More-with-Less. Written by a former Mennonite missionary hoping to provide religious households with a practical way to respond to world hunger, the cookbook's message of a simple diet that could transform users' influence on the world is an early example of the religious environmentalism that has grown increasingly popular among middle-class American Protestants in the last several decades. By examining its historical context, narrating its genesis, and critically assessing the spirituality it recommended, this article argues that the cookbook provides a useful window into Protestant environmental spirituality, its version of which allowed practitioners to maintain traditional institutional relationships and conceptions of the divine while cultivating the individuated religiosity increasingly sought after in modern culture. Emerging in the institutional overlap of traditional religious organizations and the putatively secular formations of mass media, globalization, and consumer culture, the cookbook leveraged the incipient emphasis on lifestyle choices within consumer culture to craft an individuated response to a vision of the world in permanent crisis. More-with-Less and the Protestant environmental spirituality it represents shed light on current scholarly debates about the form religion takes within modern contexts of secularity, especially when religious practitioners seek adaptations that can maintain traditional theological and organizational commitments.

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 1899, a religious revival in Needles, California, included the first recorded instance of tongues-speech in California. The revival was begun by a white Holiness preacher and included a predominantly Native American, but ethnically mixed, congregation. The Mohave Indians at the heart of the Needles Revival had survived in the Southern California borderlands by crossing boundaries and building new communities in the shadow of the modernizing state. As they participated in the Needles Revival, Mohave believers and others combined this pattern of boundary crossing with the theology and praxis of the Holiness movement to develop a local manifestation of the emerging Pentecostal movement. During the early twentieth century, a series of revivals around the world and a network of Holiness groups and missionaries developed into modern Pentecostalism. The most prominent of these revivals took place on Azusa Street in Los Angeles and emphasized speaking in tongues and multiracial community, not unlike the earlier revival in Needles. Taken together, these two revivals show the influence of Southern California on early Pentecostalism. Speaking in tongues enabled early Pentecostals to cross boundaries imposed by California's racial hierarchy, and the multiethnic communities they formed were a testament to the cultural dynamism of the region. As Mohave converts embraced Pentecostalism and eventually assumed leadership of the Needles congregation, they brought their legacy of survival and adaptation to the movement. In the process, they helped to shape modern Pentecostalism.

Scholars of African-American religious history have recently debated the significance of the black church in American history. Those that have, pro and con, have often considered the black church as a singular entity, despite the fact that African Americans affiliated with a number of different religious traditions under the umbrella of the black church. This article posits that it is useful to consider denominational and theological developments within different African-American churches. Doing so acknowledges plural creations and developments of black churches, rather than a singular black church, which better accounts for the historical experience of black religion. In this piece, I analyze four different denominational and theological traditions that blacks followed in the early Republic: the Anglican–Episcopalian, the Calvinist (Congregational–Presbyterian), the Methodist, and the Baptist. Each offered a unique ecclesiastical structure and set of theological assumptions within which black clergy and laity operated. Each required different levels of interaction with white coreligionists, and, although some tended to offer more direct opportunities for reform and resistance, all groups suffered differing constraints that limited such action. I argue that the two bodies connected to formalist traditions, the Episcopalian and Calvinist, were initially better developed despite their smaller size, and thus disproportionately shaped black community and reform efforts in the antebellum United States.

This article places the World's Parliament of Religions in its social-political milieu of Gilded Age Chicago. It takes up the Parliament not to rehash arguments that scholars have made about its particular performance of religion but, rather, to locate its pluralist production in finer-grained material expenditures and extractions that made it possible. It tells this story through an examination of the Parliament's organizer, Charles Carroll Bonney. Employed as a federal judge in Chicago, Bonney's life reflects the coterminous boundaries of capital, state-building, and aspirations for the reconciliation of human conflict through multireligious unity. His tenure as the organizer of the Parliament, and as the President of the World Congress Auxiliary of which it was a part, was riddled by raging conflict with Chicago's union leaders, who saw the events as an indirect attack on the city's labor movement. To analyze the Parliament in light of these factors is to begin to understand the history of American religious pluralism as constituted by—and, thus, inextricable from—histories of labor, capital, and the state.

This article highlights the U.S. Armed Forces’ appointment of the YMCA to train American soldiers in boxing during World War I and so contributes to scholarly research on religion and war as well as religion and sports. As the YMCA taught the fistic art to white regiments in stateside military camps and to the American Expeditionary Forces on the Western Front, I argue that World War I was a watershed moment for both Muscular Christianity and boxing. Religious, political, and military leaders announced boxing to be ideal for the close-proximity encounters in the trenches, and they championed the YMCA as being best equipped to turn newly enlisted recruits into hardened trench-pugs. To the YMCA-military, the practical benefits of boxing were that soldiers would not just be “good with their hands” but also have a good manly character, a “fighting spirit.” In the establishment of a new world order, boxing thereby became a bellicose technique for unmaking evil others and a Christian method for remaking “overcivilized” white men. Immediately after the war—because of the Y—the sport of boxing, previously believed unscrupulous, was redeemed. Protestant Christians and a larger public recast boxing as less an activity for the morally corrupt and the criminal underworld and more an enlightened pursuit in the realization of an authentic, God-given human nature. Legalized, mainstreamed, and backed by antimodern logic, Christian theology, and white fears of racial devolution, boxing was for “character” more than crime.