Religious diversity has long been a defining feature of the American landscape. It has also long been perceived as a threat by the nation’s most powerful religious actors. This course will examine the history of religious diversity, religious freedom, and religious oppression in the United States. Along the way, we will explore the deep entanglements of religion, race, and politics in the nation’s past and present. Special attention will be given to the role of religion in conflicts over colonization, immigration, slavery, and sexuality.
In this course, we will encounter religious communities that have disrupted dominant norms of gender and sexuality, exploring a range of geographic, cultural, and historical contexts. As we study queerness in many different forms, we will discover just how often religion and queerness have coincided, even as anti-queerness has been crucial to the maintenance of religious power. The course functions as an introduction to both religious studies and queer studies, equipping students to use a variety of tools from both fields.
Though widely mocked and maligned, televangelism has enjoyed extraordinary success. Ever since its emergence in the 1950s, this genre has directly impacted many millions of people and significantly shaped the worlds of religion, media, politics, and the economy in the United States and around the globe. In this course, we will study televangelism from the 1950s to the present, focusing on the United States while examining several case studies outside of North America. As we engage a range of audiovisual primary sources, we will explore questions of performance, affect, rhetoric, charisma, conversion, belief, race, gender, and more.