Charles McCrary

“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?

Engaging with Logan's third chapter, on the American Seamen's Friends Society, this piece reflects on what it means to cringe in the context of a benevolent or charitable relationship. People cringe when they are made painfully aware of the gap between their self -conception (and/or their ideal self) and the way others perceive them. Logan shows us, in her study of the ASFS, the cringeworthy nature of antebellum benevolent societies: they learned about the objects of their benevolence (in this case, sailors), performed rituals alongside them, and attempted to befriend them, and yet they did not ultimately want to be them or be like them but, rather, to change them.

This article analyzes eugenics and the secular in early twentieth-century California through the career of Luther Burbank. Burbank was a famous plant breeder who cultivated a theory of human progress based on his breeding work. For him, humans were part of an always-evolving and immanently spiritual natural world. And it was the task of civilized people to perfect that world, making it more beautiful and more productive. This project rested on an enchanted secularization narrative in which the wondrous natural world is made better through human direction. Late in his life, in the 1920s, Burbank turned his attention to fundamentalists and their “primitive” and “superstitious” beliefs about evolution. With attention to the aesthetics of the secular, this article analyzes secularism as a biopolitical project that racializes religion and its others. In Burbank’s case, this project is the result of a liberal romanticism that sought to unite spirituality and science.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of people who were arrested for pretending telling fortunes appealed their convictions on religious freedom grounds. These accused fortune tellers, mostly white spiritualist women, were arrested for violating state statutes across the United States, from New York to Georgia to Oklahoma to Washington. Though each defendant lost her case, their arguments showcase previously understudied early twentieth-century attempts by relatively disempowered actors to expand the scope of religious freedom. One law professor, named Blewett Lee, wrote a series of articles in the 1920s in which he considered these cases and their implications, identifying central problems and advancing prescient arguments about religious freedom. This article thinks with Lee and the accused fortune tellers to highlight two key aspects of secularism and American religious freedom. First, it uncovers the epistemological assumptions embedded into jurisprudence and legislation around "fortune telling." Many of the statutes, which were based on English vagrancy laws, applied to "persons pretending to tell fortunes." The term "pretending" raised questions about what the law presumed to be true and whether secular states could adjudicate religious veracity. Second, this article argues that secularism is regulatory and that scholars should connect religious freedom to histories of policing, licensure, and other forms of regulation. These two aspects, one primarily conceptual and the other practical and procedure, work together to delineate the parameters of American religious freedom, as secular state agents both define "religious belief" and regulate believers.