Sessions at the 9th Biennial Conference

The 9th Biennial Conference will include eight sessions on various topics related to religion and American culture. Each panel consists of scholars from a variety of fields, institutions, and subject areas, framing the conversation before turning it over for an interdisciplinary, full-room discussion on the topic at hand.

Details on sessions will be added as they are finalized.

Conspirituality

Throughout American history, populist movements have often looked for hidden truths and behind-the-scenes activities to explain social upheaval. Today, we see a fusion of UFO disclosure movements, Q-Anon narratives, and digital apocalypticism. From the ‘Q-drops’ to leaked UAP footage, these movements prioritize esoteric interpretation over institutional expertise. Is what we are seeing a “new religion” being born in the digital age, or is this simply the latest update of traditional American millenarianism using new tools? How do these digital-populist epistemologies challenge our traditional academic categories of “religion” versus “conspiracy theory,” and is the distinction between the two still analytically useful?

Panelists:

• Susan Lepselter, Indiana University Indianapolis
• Stephen C. Finley, Louisiana State University
• Leigh Eric Schmidt, Washington University in St. Louis

Public Authority

Moments of crisis—violent crime, political upheaval, moral panic, or national trauma—often generate intense media demand for scholarly expertise. What assumptions about religion and American culture shape how scholars are framed in crisis coverage? Are there ethical stakes of scholarly participation in media during moments of public fear or moral outrage? How do moments of crisis reshape the public authority of religious expertise itself? Historically and sociologically, what patterns persist across crises—and what changes with new media ecosystems?

Panelists:

• R. Marie Griffith, Washington University in St. Louis
• Simran Jeet Singh, Union Theological Seminary
• Matthew D. Taylor, Georgetown University

Revolution

This year marks 250 years since the Declaration of Independence was written. The American Revolution offers a foundational case in which religious interpretation and social transformation unfolded together. Similar revolutions are moments of intensified moral and political imagination, in which inherited authorities are challenged and new visions of justice, sovereignty, and collective identity are articulated. Religion has often been central to these moments—legitimating rebellion and restraint alike, mobilizing popular action, and shaping the moral horizons of revolutionary possibility. Bringing together scholars of religion and the American Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and the U.S. Civil War (understood here as a failed revolution that freed people), this panel asks: How did religious ideas and practices authorize revolutionary violence while also disciplining its excesses? In what ways did religion enable both radical rupture and deep continuity in revolutionary moral orders? How did religious idioms shape the racial and social boundaries of freedom across different revolutionary contexts? And how does attending to religion help explain why some revolutionary transformations endured, while others narrowed, stalled, or were domesticated in their aftermath?

Panelists:

• James P. Byrd, Vanderbilt University
• Nicole Myers Turner, Princeton University
• Maria Cecilia Ulrickson, Catholic University of America

Resistance

Religious actors and institutions have repeatedly supplied the moral languages, organizational infrastructures, and symbolic repertoires that animate American resistance. This panel asks how religion has legitimated, accelerated, complicated, or constrained movements for social change—historically and in the present. What counts as “religious” resistance—belief, ritual, institution, network, identity, prophecy, or moral narrative—and how do these dimensions appear differently across movements? When does religious resistance expand democratic inclusion, and when does it re‑inscribe hierarchy? How do we assess its ambivalent legacies? What do historians’ attention to contingency and context and sociologists’ attention to structure and mechanism reveal when read together?

Panelists:

• Lloyd Barba, Amherst College
• Sandra Lynn Barnes, Brown University
• Ruth Braunstein, Johns Hopkins University

Institutional Challenges

Higher Education is among the social institutions that have seen the most challenges over the past decade. From lost enrollment to the demographic cliff, from cut state appropriations to canceled research grants, colleges and universities are facing unknown futures. What concerns are on the horizon? How do academic leaders confront challenges in ways that incorporate or help faculty? How do leaders who have backgrounds and research expertise in the humanities and liberal arts make a claim for their continued prioritization in this political and cultural climate?

Panelists:

• Kathryn McClymond, President of Oglethorpe University
• John McGreevy, Provost of University of Notre Dame
• Jonathan L. Walton, President of Princeton Theological Seminary

Academic Freedom

Teaching about religion in a public university in a “red state.” Teaching about it in a private religious college. Both can present challenges to faculty, both in their research and in the classroom. What is the state of academic freedom today in the study of American religions? How have state legislatures, boards of trustees, philanthropists, parents, and even colleagues affected what we study and what we teach? Have things shifted in the recent past, and if so, how?

Panelists:

• Elesha Coffman, Baylor University
• Emily Suzanne Johnson, Ball State University
• Nancy Khalil, University of Michigan

Innovation

Recent scholarship on religion in American culture has moved beyond familiar narratives, sources, and scales of analysis, opening new ways of seeing how religion operates in everyday life, political imagination, material worlds, and systems of power. This panel invites conversation around emerging and innovative approaches by asking: What happens when scholars shift attention from belief and institutions to practice, embodiment, mobility/movement, affect, and material culture? How are digital tools, spatial analysis, sound, visual media, and data-driven methods reshaping the study of religious life and authority? In what ways are scholars rethinking archives—reading against the grain, using nontraditional sources, or foregrounding absence, silence, and loss? How do interdisciplinary methods from anthropology, Black studies, literary studies, sociology, media studies, and critical race and gender studies challenge inherited categories like “religion,” “secular,” and “culture”? And how might these new approaches not only change what we know about religion in America, but also how we understand power, inequality, and belonging more broadly?

Panelists:

• Laura Levitt, Temple University
• Sylvester A. Johnson, Northwestern University
• Christian Smith, Independent Scholar

Adaptation

With fewer academic jobs, more students who know little about religion, and departments being merged or shuttered, how should we as a field think about our role in academia today and going forward? How will research on religion in America be done and by whom? What will be the role of religion classes in a narrower curriculum? How do we teach outside the shrinking classroom? Rather than simply decry our losses, what are the paths forward, and what needs to be done to make them sustainable? This panel will look at exciting interpretations of religious studies both in and outside the traditional classroom to think through the future of a field that’s relevance is increasing while opportunity for scholarship largely is not.

Panelists:

• Amy DeRogatis, Michigan State University
• Terrence L. Johnson, Harvard Divinity School