At Home and Abroad

From right to left, notions of religion and religious freedom are fundamental to how many Americans have understood their country and themselves. Ideas of religion, politics, and the interplay between them are no less crucial to how the United States has engaged with the world beyond its borders. Yet scholarship on American religion tends to bracket the domestic and foreign, despite the fact that assumptions about the differences between ourselves and others deeply shape American religious categories and identities.At Home and Abroad bridges the divide in the study of American religion, law, and politics between domestic and international, bringing together diverse and distinguished authors from religious studies, law, American studies, sociology, history, and political science to explore interrelations across conceptual and political boundaries. They bring into sharp focus the ideas, people, and institutions that provide links between domestic and foreign religious politics and policies. Contributors break down the categories of domestic and foreign and inquire into how these taxonomies are related to other axes of discrimination, asking questions such as: What and who counts as “home” or “abroad,” how and by whom are these determinations made, and with what consequences?Offering a new approach to theorizing the politics of religion in the context of the American nation-state, At Home and Abroad also interrogates American religious exceptionalism and illuminates imperial dynamics beyond the United States.

This profound and inspiring volume turns American religion inside out, revealing the often surprising transnational and imperial connections that make it up. By setting all the categories dancing—religion and not-religion, domestic and foreign, theology and law—it illuminates how religious and national identities are mutually constituted. An exciting contribution to reflections on secular modernity., In fascinating case studies on topics as wide-ranging as yoga and Muhammad Ali, homemaking in Palestine and civic religion in Japan, At Home and Abroad brings its subject compellingly into view: an inside/outside dynamic in the workings of American religion as an object of export and a vaunted model to the world. The volume explores a tension between religious practice in the United States and the varieties of religion the United States imposes, encourages, or recognizes abroad. The tension inheres in the notion that religion is uniquely perfected at home and has yet to be perfected abroad, an ameliorative project to which the United States is central and from which it is at the same time exempt. In this way, religion operates as an engine of American exceptionalism at home and abroad even when it is in either context 'hard to see.' This stellar collection makes plain that American history is global history and that the operative borderlessness of American religion, whether manifested as freedom, empire, violence, charity, coercion, missions, or claims to self-evident truth, is a driver of both., Engaging with history, biography, and theory, the essays in this collection open new horizons for the study of American religion. Together, they demonstrate that the categories of 'at home' and 'abroad' are enormously generative—both through the distinction and through its failures. Taking us from Puerto Rico to South Africa, from Hawaii to the Philippines, these thoughtful essays are each fascinating in themselves; collectively, they show how the asymmetries between religion 'at home' and 'abroad' illuminate the working of power that always accompanies religious talk and practice., At Home and Abroad is a stimulating collection of essays that makes a major contribution in advancing understanding of how foreign and domestic policies have operated together with respect to religion. Certain to be well received.

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd is professor of political science and the Crown Chair in Middle East Studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (2008) and Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion (2015).Winnifred Fallers Sullivan is Provost Professor in the Department of Religious Studies, director of the Center for Religion and the Human, and affiliated professor of law at Indiana University Bloomington. Her books include The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (2005) and Church State Corporation: Construing Religion in U.S. Law (2020).