Current Projects
Persecuted! The End of Days, the "Criminalization" of Christianity, the Making of Christian Martyrs, and Transformation of Religious Freedom in America
Conservative Christians have been engaged in a culture war for decades but most recently those battles have been framed as battles over religious freedom. In this project I explore the historical roots of the persecution narrative as a social construction and a rhetorical mechanism, looking at the way it has reshaped what many American's thought was settled with regard to religious pluralism, tolerance and the First Amendment religion clauses.
This reshaping of the notion of religious freedom has implications for conflicts as wide-ranging as creationism and homeschooling, to the protections of basic civil rights of members of the LGBTQ community and Muslims both in the US and around the world.
Please check back for a tentative chapter outline.
Conservative Christians have been engaged in a culture war for decades but most recently those battles have been framed as battles over religious freedom. In this project I explore the historical roots of the persecution narrative as a social construction and a rhetorical mechanism, looking at the way it has reshaped what many American's thought was settled with regard to religious pluralism, tolerance and the First Amendment religion clauses.
This reshaping of the notion of religious freedom has implications for conflicts as wide-ranging as creationism and homeschooling, to the protections of basic civil rights of members of the LGBTQ community and Muslims both in the US and around the world.
Please check back for a tentative chapter outline.
The Missionary Position:
Regulating Sex as a Technique for Conversion
"Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me." John Newton (1725-1807)
Historians of American Religion have long noted its profoundly revivalist, conversionist character that dates all the way back to the Puritans.1 This style of religion has produced what Finke and Stark have called a competitive religious economy to which they attribute the persistent strength and vitality of American religion when compared to religion in other post industrialized countries.2 Yet the emphasis on a conversion experience as evidence of salvation has produced a conundrum as well: first generation converts with transformative experiences raise their children within the tradition, often ensuring their protection from the influences of “the world,” and ultimately inhibiting the very experience of wretchedness and grace described by Newton.
The Puritans were aware of this conundrum. Church membership in the colonial era was restricted to those who could satisfactorily convince church elders of the authenticity of their conversion. The result, of course, was declining church membership among those in the second generation. The Puritan’s answer was the “half-way covenant” which allowed a limited form of membership among those raised in the church but who remained “unconverted.”
This project explores another answer provided by contemporary American evangelicalism and fundamentalism: the identification (perhaps conflation) of sex with sin, the tight regulation of sexuality, and its implications for public discourse on morality in what is called the culture wars.
I examine how tight regulation of sexuality serves as a mechanism for the perpetuation of this form of Christianity by convincing potential converts that they are, indeed, in need of the forgiveness that the tradition offers. It will examine the resulting sub-culture produced by the emphasis on sex as sin, and then look at the way in which that aspect of the sub-culture has shaped conservative Protestants’ engagement in the larger American culture over issues of gender and sexuality.
My theory is that the strongly conversionist traditions of conservative Protestantism require the production and maintenance of boundaries that insure members will inevitably violate them. In other words, I believe that the relentless focus on sexuality and sin in conservative Protestantism creates, in its members, the experience of profound moral failure that drives them to seek exactly what the tradition offers: forgiveness. In turn, that experience produces a subculture in which culture war battles over gender, sexuality and “family issues” are central.
Click here for a tentative chapter outline.
Copyright © 2015 Julie Ingersoll. All rights reserved.