This session examines the role of religion in shaping (and contesting) particular moral and political futures in the United States through ethnography, historical mapping, and discourse analysis. Paper topics include: evangelical Christian mothers in Texas negotiate schooling choices as projects of moral formation amid curricular and legislative battles; the forgotten role of congregations in providing spatial support for LGBTQ+ organizing in the Stonewall-era; and how the discourse of “Christian nationalism” motivates and mobilizes progressive Christian grassroots action. Taken together, the session highlights the concrete ways that religious groups claim social authority, contribute to grassroots social movements, narrate perceived public threats, and build alternative futures in the United States as well as how the work of religious “future-making” is mediated through institutions, infrastructure, media, and activism.
Decisions about how children should be raised and educated are an important arena of future negotiation. Drawing on ethnographic research with women at First Baptist Dallas, this paper examines how evangelical mothers envision the future through choices about their children’s schooling. Conversations about whether to homeschool, enroll in private Christian schools, or remain in public schools reveal concerns not only about moral formation and religious identity but also cultural authority and social change. Based on fieldwork conducted from 2018–2021, the paper analyzes how mothers frame schooling decisions as part of their responsibility to shape the moral future of the next generation. These everyday deliberations illuminate broader debates in Texas over the role of religion in public education, including legislation related to the Ten Commandments in classrooms and expanded scriptural references in state curricula. Mothers’ stories reveal how struggles over schooling are struggles over whose vision of the future will prevail.
This paper presents key findings from a historical mapping project, which This paper presents key findings from a historical mapping project, which investigates religious organizations' space-sharing relationships with LGBTQ+ organizations during the 1960s and 1970s. Movement narratives have long attributed the grassroots insurgency to the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City, an incident popularly remembered as "the birthplace of pride." This project complicates the remembered history of Stonewall-era organizing with a focus on the local movement spaces that facilitated grassroots LGBTQ+ growth. This analysis builds on queer community histories, which de-center the Stonewall narrative and trace the distinct local conflicts that galvanized local and regional activism. My research, in turn, maps the surprising and largely forgotten role of local congregations and other religiously-connected spaces as an infrastructure for this growth. These religious organizations facilitated LGBTQ+ movement as meeting spaces and movement centers. This grassroots focus on religious infrastructure offers a new framework for mapping--and analyzing-- LGBTQ+ movement emergence.
One significant audience, or public, for the voluminous scholarly and journalistic literature on (white) Christian nationalism is progressive Christians. Many of them peruse polling data, listen to podcasts, subscribe to Substacks, and read articles and books to understand their political opponents and co-religionists. This paper explores how progressive Christians have engaged with the term “Christian nationalism” in order to organize, define their opponents, and motivate political action. Our research is based on interviews and fieldwork with several local chapters of the group Christians Against Christian Nationalism. We also offer discursive and visual analysis of their digital products, including podcasts and social media. In tumultuous times, these groups have found Christian nationalism to be a useful way to name their political opponents, even when they are loved ones, family members, and fellow church members. And at a time of potential resurgence of progressive Christianity, we offer detailed accounts of grassroots mobilization.