As part of the ongoing departmental colloquia, the graduate students in the Religion in the Americas and the Religion and Society areas of concentration invited three guest speakers to present works in progress on February 8th, 2021. The panelist also participated in further discussion as part of Professor Jonathan Schofer’s graduate seminar, “Sexuality, Body, and Religion.”
Kathryn Gin Lum discussed the middle chapters of her forthcoming book, tentatively titled The Heathen World and America’s Humanitarian Impulse. The book considers the figure of the “heathen,” examining the relationship between religious and racial forms of othering.
She described the development nineteenth-century American ideas about “heathen” bodies by examining how “heathenness” served as a sweeping category, even as scientific racism attempted to parse and differentiate. Protestant Americans blamed a host of bodily woes on heathenism, holding themselves up, by contrast, as hale humanitarians.
Lucia Hulsether presented a paper she is working on related to a think-piece she published called “Gay Rights and the Freedom to Buy.” The research paper in progress theorizes the history of religious freedom law as a history of racial performance.
It reads the aesthetic practices surrounding the Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby case and the subsequent consumer culture flurry around Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Building on but ultimately departing from religious freedom law as a vehicle for launching competing rights-based claims, she shows the processes through which Hobby Lobby’s Christian family secured its religious exemption by conjuring ghosts of settler dispossession of indigenous people, even as an elderly Jewish justice was made to refuse submissive white femininity in the likeness of a black gangsta rapper. Circulated as competing minstrel brands, both performances consolidate the anti-black and anti-indigenous grounds on which religious freedom laws—and certain protests against them—have flourished in neoliberal capitalism.
Tony T. R. Lin presented from his book, Prosperity Gospel Latinos and Their American Dream, particularly focusing on physical relationships and the way Pentecostalism is embodied. Prosperity Gospel Pentecostalism is the fastest growing form of Christianity in the world. It is a religion that brings other-worldly rewards into the here and now. It is a religion grounded in the American ideals of individualism, materialism, and meritocracy.
The presentation explored the intersection of two trends shaping modern America: the influence of Prosperity Gospel Christianity and the demographic growth of Latino in the US. Religion is a meaning-system that helps believers make sense of their world. Working under the premise that Prosperity Gospel is the Gospel of the American Dream, this presentation will explore the ways that Prosperity Gospel functions as a meaning-making system for first generation Latin American immigrants as they make sense of American life. Special attention will be paid to the ways that this religion is embodied by adherents while simultaneously teaching them to embody a particular form of American identity. Prosperity Gospel is socializing adherents into an inherently American culture.
Kathryn Gin Lum is associate professor of Religious Studies in collaboration with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and History (by courtesy) at Stanford University. She is the author of Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction (Oxford 2014) and co-editor, with Paul Harvey, of The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History (Oxford 2018). Her current book project, The Heathen World and America’s Humanitarian Impulse, is forthcoming from Harvard University Press.
Lucia Hulsether is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College. She received her PhD in Religious Studies from Yale University last May, and she also holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard and a BA from Agnes Scott College. Her first book, Liberated Market: The Cultural Politics of Capitalist Humanitarianism, is under contract with Duke University Press.
Tony Tian-Ren Lin is a Research Professor at New York Theological Seminary and the Program Director for Leadership Development at Trinity Church Wall Street in New York City. He is a cultural sociologist whose scholarship focuses on the intersection of religion, immigration, race, and ethnicity. He is the author of Prosperity Gospel Latinos and Their American Dream (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), which Publisher’s Weekly praises as a “well-reasoned,” “evocative debut” that “immerse[s] readers in the lives of his subjects.” His work has been featured on NPR, LatinoUSA, The Atlantic Monthly, and other national media.
