This panel presents three diverse and sometimes surprising perspectives on conservative ideologies by situating them firmly within U.S. religious history. The first paper examines the role of “colorblind conservatism” during the 1960s and 1970s as a result of the prosperity gospel’s insistence on moral failure as the cause of the inequality of non-white Americans. The second explores how conservative women’s groups from the United Daughters of the Confederacy to Moms for Liberty have exerted control over U.S. public school history curriculum and the far reaching impact of this influence on the nation’s future. The final paper reexamines the ideological and spiritual roots of Donald Trump’s rhetoric in his two election victories. With attention to American metaphysical traditions and neoliberal market logic, this paper ties Trump and his rhetoric to very American national myths.
This paper analyzes the relationship between prosperity gospel theology and colorblind conservatism in the years between Brown v. Board and the 1978 Bakke ruling. It argues that the boom in prosperity gospel churches and platforms in the 60s and 70s is both a product of and contributor to the rise of colorblind conservatism during those decades due to the way the prosperity gospel's highly individualistic theology paints a lack of success as stemming exclusively from personal moral failure and not from systemic barriers to upward mobility for non-white Americans. Because God and the free market would bless and chasten individuals as they deserved, under this framework, any policies that took into consideration a degree of racial preference—like affirmative action or today's DEI policies—could and would be labeled an infringement on the rights and freedoms of those they passed over—namely, white Americans.
From the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) to Moms for Liberty, conservative women’s groups have been powerful architects of historical memory. Belied by particular theological beliefs around race and gender, these groups have waged wars for control over how U.S. history is taught in public schools. The UDC’s Lost Cause narrative framed the Confederacy as ordained by God, just as Moms for Liberty invokes Christian values to challenge discussions of race, gender, and social justice in schools. Both groups leverage rhetoric of “freedom” to exclude perspectives that challenge their ideological commitments. Through lobbying, textbook influence, and public rituals, they have embedded their vision of history into American education. By examining their strategies, this paper reveals how religiously motivated conservative women have wielded extraordinary influence in shaping public education—demonstrating that battles over history are, at their core, battles over the future.
Was Donald Trump’s election—twice—shaped by the ideological undercurrents of American metaphysical religion? If Norman Vincent Peale’s gospel of self-made success was more than New Thought-evangelical subculture but, as Catherine Albanese argues in The Delight Makers (2024), the fabric of American theology, then Trump’s political ethos—his relentless optimism, self-mastery rhetoric, and ‘Make America Great/Healthy Again’ paradigm—merits reexamination. This paper brings together Albanese’s Delight Makers and Republic of Mind and Spirit (2007), Cathy Gutierrez’s Plato’s Ghost (2009), and Kate Bowler’s Blessed (2013) to trace New Thought’s metaphysical endurance—from nineteenth-century spiritualists to Peale’s midcentury positive thinking through to Trump’s America. It asks whether the metaphysical tradition, fused with neoliberal market logic, has not just shaped the self-help genre but infused American politics with Albanese’s ‘theology of desire’—where ‘faith in belief’ functions as an operational gaze, a mechanism of control. This paper ultimately reconsiders how Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches myth remains a national creed.