‘Driven Insane by Eddyism’: Christian Science, Popular Psychopathology, and a Turn-of-the-Century Contest over Faith and Madness

ABSTRACT At the turn of the twentieth century, Christian Scientists contended with ongoing allegations that their faith was more of a mental pathology than a religion. This article analyzes how the Church of Christ, Scientist, in particular its public relations branch the Committee on Publication, systematically contended with popular portrayals of Christian Science as a source or indicator of insanity. Two highly profiled court cases, both predicated on the purported insanity of a Christian Science woman and her attendant inability to manage her business affairs, are explored for their cultural effect on the promotion of the causal association between Christian Science and madness. This study employs newspaper clippings collected and archived by the Church's Committee on Publication as well as court records to argue for the salience of the insanity charge in shaping the early history of Christian Science and its public perception. As a religious tradition premised on divine healing and health, popular psychopathological interpretations of Christian Science were particularly subversive and functioned not only to discredit and undermine the religion's claims to healing but to forward societal fears that Christian Science study posed a unique threat to women's health. This examination draws attention to a dynamic historical exchange between the press and a new religious movement, as well as the polyvalent gendered presumptions embedded in popular charges of insanity in association with religion.

The “Black Buddhism Plan”: Buddhism, Race, and Empire in the Early Twentieth Century

ABSTRACT This article traces the life of a single figure, Sufi Abdul Hamid, to bring into conversation the history of the transmission of Buddhism to the United States with the emergence of new Black religio-racial movements in the early twentieth century. It follows Hamid's activities in the 1930s to ask what Hamid's life reveals about the relationship between Buddhism and race in the United States. On the one hand, Hamid's own negotiation of his identity as a Black Orientalist illustrates the contentious process through which individuals negotiate their religio-racial identities in tension with hegemonic religio-racial frameworks. Hamid constructed a Black Orientalist identity that resignified Blackness while criticizing the racial injustice foundational to the American nation-state. His Black Orientalist identity at times resonated with global Orientalist discourses, even while being recalcitrant to the hegemonic religio-racial frameworks of white Orientalism. The subversive positioning of Hamid's Black Orientalist identity simultaneously lent itself to his racialization by others. This is illustrated through Hamid's posthumous implication in a conspiracy theory known as the “Black Buddhism Plan.” This theory drew on imaginations of a Black Pacific community formulated by both Black Americans and by government authorities who created Japanese Buddhists and new Black religio-racial movements as subjects of surveillance. The capacious nature of Hamid's religio-racial identity, on the one hand constructed and performed by Hamid himself, and on the other created in the shadow of the dominant discourses of a white racial state, demonstrates that Buddhism in the United States is always constituted by race.

Smelling Things: Essential Oils and Essentialism in Contemporary American Spirituality

ABSTRACT Contemporary yogis, evangelical Christians, and witches have incorporated essential oils and their aromas into practices as diverse as yoga, meditation, prayer, Bible reading, anointing, and spellcasting in the United States over the past forty years. These groups often view each other with alarm, yet they tread common ground in utilizing essential oils to intensify varied spiritual practices. This article answers two related questions. How do spiritually diverse practitioners justify using the same consumer products to amplify their practices, and why are essential oils considered sacred by these same consumers? Drawing from a diverse archive of essential oil use guides, marketing materials, and social media posts, I argue that spiritual “oilers” are (1) perennialists who mythologize ancient uses of scent to authenticate their postmodern embodied practices, and (2) essentialists who believe that essential oils contain universal, transcendent properties. Consequently, oilers’ beliefs and practices blur classifications between traditions and sharpen our attention to the importance of the sense of smell in contemporary spirituality. This project contributes to studies of spirituality and consumerism by offering a comparative analysis of how three groups use smell, via essential oils, to intensify their individual spiritual practices as well as their collective identities as oilers.

Lotteries and Overlapping Providences in Early America

ABSTRACT What kind of world did early American men and women believe they were living in? Did God choose lottery winners or did intellectual, economic, and scientific insights engender more reasonable, skeptical, or secular formulations? Lotteries were a common and uncontroversial presence in early American economic and civic life, funding the construction of everything from bridges to churches. George Washington liked giving lottery tickets as gifts. Denmark Vesey purchased his freedom by winning a lottery. Although scholars have used the lottery and other forms of gambling to make important claims about class and culture in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, lotteries hold rich, untapped insights for American religious history. By offering a specific causal experience to explain, lotteries prompted answers from their participants, known as “adventurers,” about why things happened. Relying on firsthand accounts of lottery winners, correspondence among the managers who oversaw lotteries, promotional schemes designed to entice participation, and newspaper coverage, this article demonstrates providence's ongoing centrality to causality in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century America. Far from jettisoning an animated, meaningful universe with the aid of reason or in the face of debilitating doubt, lottery adventurers employed both longstanding and novel versions of providence to explain how the world worked and how God worked in the world.

“A verry poor place for our doctrine”: Religion and Race in the 1853 Mormon Mission to Jamaica

ABSTRACT This article examines the first Mormon mission to Jamaica in January 1853. The missionaries, facing opposition from both black and white Jamaicans, returned to the United States after only a month on the island, having made only four converts. Latter-day Saints did not return to Jamaica for another 125 years. Drawing on the missionaries’ personal papers, church archives, local newspaper reports, and governmental records, I argue that the 1853 mission played a crucial role in shaping nineteenth-century Mormonism's racial theology, including the “temple and priesthood ban” that restricted priesthood ordination and temple worship for black men and women. While historians have rightly noted the role twentieth-century missions to regions of the African Diaspora played in ending the ban, studies of the racial restriction's early scope have been discussed in almost exclusively American contexts. The mission to Jamaica, precisely because of its failure, helped shape the ban's implementation and theological justifications. Failing to make any inroads, the elders concluded that both Jamaica and its inhabitants were cursed and not worthy of the missionaries’ time, which anticipated later decisions to prioritize preaching to whites and to scale back and ultimately abandon efforts to proselytize people of African descent.

Queer Rumors: Protestant Ministers, Unnatural Deeds, and Church Censure in the Twentieth-Century United States

ABSTRACTOver the course of the twentieth century, dozens of conservative Protestant ministers were accused of sexual deviance—including instances of same-sex acts and attractions. Protestant churches, in turn, experimented with employing various tactics to undermine and challenge such accusations. From silencing and secrecy to public censure and disassociation, denominational bodies labored to undermine evidence of queerness among their ministers. This essay surveys a one-hundred-year history of religious groups’ and institutions’ attempts at dealing with the uncomfortable but persistent allegations of not-quite-straightness among their leaders. This story accounts for how conservative Protestantism has been able to maintain its claims to a particular kind of sexual morality even as religious leaders themselves have repeatedly jeopardized this project.

The Politics of Interdependent Independence in Black Religion: The Case of the Reverend George Freeman Bragg Jr., a Black Episcopal Priest

In the Reconstruction period, Black religion and politics intersected and fostered ideas about black interdependent independence in predominantly white churches. We see this form of black religious politics exemplified in the experiences and ideas of the Reverend George Freeman Bragg Jr., a Black Episcopal priest who was educated at the Branch Theological School (BTS) in Petersburg, Virginia. It was upon the foundation of Bragg's experiences at the BTS, established as a racially segregated alternative to the Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary (in Alexandria, Virginia), and in the Readjuster Movement (a biracial political coalition that controlled Virginia's legislature from 1879–1885), that he wrote histories of Black people in the Episcopal Church, histories that extolled black leadership, the need for (white) economic support for but also autonomous action of black churches and black leaders, and the efficacy of the Episcopal Church as a political training ground for black church members. Bragg's case both demonstrates how broadening the definitions of black religion reconfigures studies of religion, reconstruction, and Blackness, and expands our notions of Black political critique as deriving from more than the familiar binaries of protest and accommodation.