American Fanatics: Religion, Rebellion, and Empire in the Nineteenth Century

My current book project, American Fanatics, is forthcoming from New York University Press’s North American Religions Book Series.

In 1822 Thomas Jefferson wrote that “the atmosphere of our country is unquestionably charged with a threatening cloud of fanaticism.” Jefferson’s forecast was accurate. The United States in the 1800s was full of radical theologies, messiahs, utopian dreams, passionate exhortations, and sacred violence. Whether these lightning storms constituted a religious energy vital to the national and imperial spirit (what Jefferson called the “empire of liberty”) or a threatening storm that threatened human reason and social order was an open question.

American Fanatics is the first book to provide a history of fanaticism in the United States. It examines fanaticism as an “overflowing signifier,” meaning that research on fanaticism requires care because the term is inherently political, full of biases, and assumptions. It traces the rise of the concept of fanaticism through distinct conflicts over evangelical revivals, abolition, sentimental literature, psychiatry, and colonial anthropology. The book argues that American uses of the term shifted from the 1800s to the early 1900s. White American Protestants, shedding past accusations of fanatical rituals, began to use fanaticism as a religious and a racial concept that signified essential civilizational capacities. Clergy, secular intellectuals, and government agents increasingly distinguished enthusiasm, as a spiritual and national good, from fanaticism, as a global problem that the United States could solve through Christian mission and power.

Teaching & Research Areas

Studying Religion in the Modern World

Predictions about the decline of religion—or at least its relegation to private life—have been premature. The discerning student of the academic study of religion can see religion’s enduring importance and how it is intimately connected to culture and politics. Knowing about religion and knowing how to study religion are critical skills to be an informed and responsible citizen of the world. The field, and my courses, offer religious and non-religious students the tools necessary to study the power of the building blocks of religion: myth, ritual, community, authority, the sacred, tradition, ethics, and supernaturalism.

Students and interested citizens can learn more about the academic study of religion at Iowa State University at our program’s website and @ISUphilRS on Instagram.

Religion in US history

My primary field of study is religion in the United States. In my teaching and research, I argue that (Protestant) Christian norms have influenced US national identity and culture, even as the US has become home to a wide array of communities and traditions. The study of secularism in the US provides an analytical framework for thinking about how secular institutions define what counts as religion proper in accordance with particular priorities and assumptions. I understand modern US to be defined not by secularization (the privatization or disappearance of religion), but by the strategic deployment of differences between science, religion, and superstition, among other key terms. Such differentiations are especially complicated to track in the environment of religious innovation and the spiritual marketplace. My work brings together analyses of law, popular culture media, religious authorities, and politicians to complicate notions of religious freedom and religion as reducible to individualized private belief.

Cults, Fanaticism, Violence

Though the common sense thinking of liberal secularism suggests that religions are, or at least should be, peaceful, recent scholarship argues that we should also attend to the varieties of religion categorized as cult-ish, fanatical, or radical. Such categories and communities require historicization and contextualization to properly understand. My work, especially in my book project American Fanatics, attends to how secular institutions and religious communities alike have sparred over divine authenticity, spirited feelings, and sacred violence.

Game Studies, Game Design, and Humanities Education

Digital and analog games are rising forms of media that excel at abstracting real-world systems, prompting player interactivity, and rewarding engaged attention. Games also make arguments about the world as it is or should be. From the earliest board games such as Senet or Mehen to modern games such as Civilization, Assassin’s Creed, or Okami, religion and culture play a role in the development, experience, and social interpretation of games. In terms of game studies my emerging research projects examine the rise of cult-builder games that systematize presumed sociological and psychological cult dynamics. In terms of game design, I am in the early stages of prototyping analog games with mechanics and objectives are informed by humanities research. In other words: games that make arguments. My aspiration is to create games that are educational, engaging, and have solid gameplay.