Jason C. Bivins’s research while affiliated with North Carolina State University and other places

This paper assesses American Religious Studies by attending to its institutional lineages, its tone and genre, and its sometimes unconscious methodological presumptions. Exploring the implications of Zora Neale Hurston's ‘lying up a narrative,’ this piece suggests that a series of narrative, curricular, and theoretical commitments produce a particular kind of ‘religion’ as normative in the study of American religions. As the narrative of post-denominational pluralism has become normative, a discursive ambivalence has been produced wherein a liberal, identitarian conception of religion coexists awkwardly with a radical suspicion of the analytical limits of ‘religion’ as an object of study. Identifying the different nodes of this ambivalence, this essay suggests that scholars might move beyond analytical repetition or paralysis by pluralizing method, genre, and style.

This paper addresses the roles of violence in American religions from several different analytical locations. It explores the prospects for thinking about violence alongside the pedagogically slippery category "religion," problematizing both terms as a way of opening up inquiry beyond the essentialization of "religion" and the treatment of violence as exceptional. It examines methodological debates about the scope and motivations of religious violence, by thinking about the cultural politics of pluralist narratives and the complexities of identity and alterity in religions. It ranges across U.S. religious history to harvest overarching themes that might stimulate inquiry, proposing a broader range of "violent" religious expressions that could extend to protest, cultures of militarism, apocalypticism, and the antagonisms of public life. And finally, it assesses the pedagogical possibilities and limits of this topic, focusing on political pedagogy, the fluidity of narratives, and the uses of comparative thinking.

Abstract This paper attempts not to continue the methodological interrogation of “belief” as a category central to Religious Studies, but to problematize and analyze the ubiquity of such interrogations. Investigations of “belief,” I argue, are also occasions to explore the discipline’s less obvious investments in intellectual and institutional traditions still shackled to the very category under scrutiny. The stand-alone category “religion” that is so central to political culture and disciplinary formation depends on “belief” to facilitate recognition. Thus, while Religious Studies now habitually discredits “belief” as a ubiquitous analytical category, it also partly depends on “belief’s” presences for its disciplinary self-justification.

Perhaps no moment in the history of American religions captures enduring themes more than the overdetermined Salem Witch Trials. During these religio-moral spectacles of 1692–1693, a blend of exhortations concerning national destiny, scrupulous alterity, and high public drama combined to produce not simply corpses and social calamity but more significantly, a fascination with demonology and religious scapegoating that has over time become a recognizable part of American culture. Yet in these wild exchanges between piety, power, and demonology we find something not just American but perhaps something more generally Christian as well. This is not meant as a sophomoric denunciation of Christian imperial designs, as if nothing but the Crusades and the Witch Trials ever mattered anyway, but to suggest that the complicated textures of Christian identities and social engagements (especially in the United States) have depended on their monsters.