Charles McCrary

Edited by TIF editorial board member Charles McCrary (Eckerd College) this forum considers the legacy of New Thought. For nearly 200 years, many Americans have held, more or less loosely, a set of ideas about material reality—namely, that thought can influence matter and, more specifically, that physical maladies both originate in and can be remedied by the mind. The New Thought movement itself was fractious and multivalent, with schisms and disagreements and nuanced interpretations. But, particularly by the early-to-mid twentieth century, its central ideas had been taken up, often in simplified forms, by a wide variety of Americans. Successful and aspirational entrepreneurs popularized the ideas during the Great Depression, setting the stage for the surging popularity of Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking in a more flush postwar economic setting.
In the twenty-first century, the movement’s influence is everywhere. From manifesting instructional videos on TikTok to prosperity gospel preaching to the practice of daily affirmations to business-school-adjacent advice about “mindset” and “visualizing success,” the grammar of New Thought has become a pervasive kind of American common sense.

This forum offers 5 essays considering the origins and legacies of New Thought. We are interested in founders and popularizers but, more so, in the ways that everyday people have taken up its ideas, knowingly or not.

“White Christian nationalism” (WCN) is, perhaps among other things, a term that circulates in liberal and centrist media, bolstered by sociological scholarship. As such, it has an awkward relationship to the field of religious studies, for theoretical and material reasons. In a time when many scholars are incentivized to produce “public scholarship,” it can be tempting to contribute to these discourses, particularly when publics show keen interest and political stakes are high. However, one of the most useful moves that all scholars know how to make—indeed, maybe the only one we all share—is to critique and historicize the category “religion,” analyzing its uses. The question then arises: Should religious studies scholars propagate discourses about WCN, or should we study them? Can we do both?