These papers argue that sites of discipline have key roles in shaping religious and American identities. With an undercurrent that these are sites of violence, these papers illustrate how asylums and prisons have policies of recognizing religions, practices of ensuring religious freedom, and goals of cultivating religious norms. One paper argues that nineteenth-century asylums shaped norms of white patriarchic authority, in a larger context of authorizing wealth through slavery. A second paper asks us to reconsider the nineteenth-century Latter-day Saint prison experience, including the limits of pluralism and tolerance in prisons and in respect to the larger US society. A third paper moves to the twenty-first century, when the Michigan Department of Corrections recognized a white supremacist movement as a religion; the paper illustrates sincere religious belief in a context of violence inside and outside the prison, and complicates the boundary between racial extremism and religious pluralism.
19th-century US historians have long recognized that both the insane asylum and the home have functioned as sites for disciplining bodies and minds into model citizens. Less attention has been given to the relationship between the asylum and the home and how both used religion to shape their residents into model citizens. This paper examines the synergistic relationship between the Southern home and the asylum and how their reality challenged their idealized archetypes as site of patriarchal authority. It also highlights how religion shaped and was shaped by the ideals of normativity – necessarily gendered/racialized – these sites were built to instill. As the niece of Duncan Cameron, one of the wealthiest slaveowners in North Carolina, Anna Cameron Kirkland’s story is an example of how religious discipline was used in the home and the asylum to discipline upper-class white women.
Six years after the Missouri Mormon War of 1838, Mormon leaders Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum were assassinated by a mob on June 27, 1844. Their murders at Carthage Jail, Illinois, were a tragic moment in the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and within larger American religious history more broadly. Besieged church members living in Nauvoo and the surrounding environs lost their two most senior leaders to religious and political violence, which demonstrated the limitations of pluralism and tolerance in Jacksonian America. Their deaths also proved the need for greater religious freedom and protections for spiritual beliefs and practices in the United States.
My objective in this paper is to introduce and contextualize the nineteenth-century Latter-day Saint prison experience and resulting writings within the larger fields of prison literature and incarceration studies.
In 2023, the Michigan Department of Corrections became the first state agency mandated to recognize the Christian Identity movement as a protected religious group entitled to hold group services within its facilities. The recognition of the controversial white-racial theology animates a number of issues concerning religious sincerity and governance in the prison context. This presentation focuses on the dynamic tensions between external authorities (in the form of the courts and prison officials) and internal authorities (in the form of long-believing inmates and religious leaders) in determining sincere adherence. Pulling from court and church records, as well as extensive interviews with incarcerated adherents, this presentation combines historical analysis and contemporary evidence to argue that while Identity Christians can be sincere believers, their recognition complicates the boundary between racial extremism and religious pluralism in prisons.