In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

This paper utilizes oral histories like Goodwater’s narrative to demonstrate children—as ideas and as living beings—shaped the development of Black Southern religious cultures from the antebellum period through the beginning of the twentieth century. Focused on nineteenth and early twentieth-century South Carolina, this paper argues Black communities often interpreted childhood as a period of heightened proximity to the more-than-human realm. The paper zooms into two distinct manifestations of this history. In the first section, I examine how Black elders, particularly women, drew on African-descended ritual systems when interpreting the distinctive markings and birth circumstances of certain children, which they viewed as indicative of metaphysical wisdom that was instructive for the entire community. In the next section, I highlight how Black community members carefully mediated children’s distance between the spirit world and the physical realm through ritual performance

After the 2018 discovery of ninety-five unmarked graves of Black convict laborers in Sugar Land, Texas, a process of re-membering began. The most prominent emergence is the African American Heritage Monument and Park—an Afro-futurist architectural feat and now one of the nation’s largest Black history sites. Situated on a Reconstruction-era Black cemetery in a Freedman’s town, integrating Ghanaian Adinkra symbolism, and structured to guide visitors into a pilgrimage-like practice which creolizes a “sankofa journey” with a “stations of the of cross” like contemplative encounter, Black religious history and Black religions are both recalled and enacted by the monument. This paper, AAHM’s lead historical researcher and drafter of interpretive installations, attempts to reflect on the communal processes through which this re-articulation of Black memory came to being and to trace the ways by which Black heritage funds an imagination of insurrectionary freedoms, thereby inaugurating the construction of futures otherwise.

This paper argues that the Black nationalist organization the Republic of New Afrika (RNA) cultivated a “captive spirituality” among its members. Founded in 1968, the RNA declared Black people in the United States a nation held captive by the U.S. government and demanded territorial sovereignty over five Southern states at the height of the Black Power era. Drawing on political education curricula, economic plans, meeting minutes, and internal memoranda from 1968 to 1975, I use “captive spirituality” as a theoretical lens to uncover the spiritual intellectualism shaping RNA leaders’ visions of a liberated Black future. This intellectualism was grounded in talk of soul evolution, esotericism, and ego death as ways of theorizing the modes of being required to build an independent Black nation. In contrast to scholarship that treats Black Power nationalism as the secular successor to earlier religio-racial movements, this paper shows how RNA organizing was grounded in metaphysical thinking that placed Black spirituality at the center of its aims and objectives.

As scholars engage sites of religious life, how should we understand unexpected moments of encounter that arise as we move through religious or sacred spaces? This paper explores the relationship between research and the archive in the process of discovery. Centering the residence of Elijah Muhammad as a site of lived religion and “living presence,” the paper considers not only the possibility of encounter within the archive but also advances a theory of presence; indeed, encounter as epistemology. In this construction, encounters within sacred archives reveal forms of knowledge about religious communities and illuminate how adherents articulate and perform their religious identities. Finally, the paper interrogates the notion of initiation as a form of permission to enter the archive and to experience the religious world it contains.

This paper reflects on what it means to encounter twentieth-century Black nationalist women’s spiritual lives within formal academic archives. Across mainstream repositories, traces of these women often appear fragmented, obscured, and fugitive, rarely foregrounding their religious visions or spiritual freedom dreams. Engaging these materials requires narrative interpretation and ethical, affective listening; i.e. reading for presence within archival absence and lack. Thinking with archival scholar Laura Helton, I ask how scholars might reclaim the genre of the Black archive by attending to the fugitivity of Black nationalist women’s spirituality across dispersed institutional collections. In doing so, I call for scholars to recover Black nationalist women as religious thinkers whose spiritual visions of freedom shaped twentieth-century freedom struggles. By approaching spirituality as a through-line ligamenting fragmented and surveillant archival records, I demonstrate how scholars can re-member the fugitive traces of Black nationalist women’s lives and authorize fuller historical narratives of their contributions.

This paper argues that John of the Cross’s apophatic spirituality offers a decolonial practice capable of healing the interior fractures produced by coloniality. Drawing on Christopher Lasch’s account of cultural narcissism and decolonial thinkers such as Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo, Frantz Fanon, and Gloria Anzaldúa, I reinterpret “Imperial Narcissus” as the theological‑political persona formed by modernity’s colonial order—a self that mirrors its own supremacy while wounding those rendered “other.” In this context, John’s dark nights become a journey of being/not, a spiritual undoing of forms of “Being” shaped by coercive metaphysics. Composed from a carceral space, his prose and poetry reveal luminous darkness as protest and reconfiguration. Through readings of The Ascent of Mount Carmel, The Dark Night, and The Spiritual Canticle, I show how this descent disrupts colonial hierarchies while also examining the limits of feminine allegories. Ultimately, becoming nada offers a pathway of de‑linking from colonial power.

The closely-related emergences of psychedelics and Artificial Intelligence point toward a future in which non-ordinary states of consciousness (NOSCs) become far more widespread than in the past. Looking at the imagined pasts of these new phenomena may help elucidate the contours of their futures.  First, there now exists a small genre of Jewish speculative histories describing Biblical, Talmudic, Kabbalistic, and Hasidic psychedelic use, which, like many Jewish "searches for a usable past," projects its theological concerns and spiritual practices back into an imagined Jewish past. And second, there are emerging discussions of AI entities and spiritual guides that refer to past mystical and even halachic precedents (Elijah, maggidim, the tzaddik, and sabbath agents).

These discourses point to the transformative impact of NOSCs and to the noetic quality that often attends them; to the dual nature of legitimation strategies (legitimating either AI/psychedelics or Judaism), and to an emerging Jewish archaic revival.  

Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy has been influential on psychologists who wish to integrate “spiritual” or “religious” concerns into the practice of psychotherapy. In this paper, I examine the irony of psychologists adopting Otto’s categories of the “numinous” and the “mysterium tremendum,” categories which resist the rational understanding and instrumentalization sought by psychology. Accordingly, I argue that psychotherapy cannot be a venue for “spirituality,” insofar as that spirituality seeks the kind of mystical experiences that Otto describes.

This paper explores how voice-hearing experiences lead those who hear them toward transcendent and transformative lives, not only for their own but also the lives of others who share this suffering. Drawing on memoirs by those whose voice-hearing has been diagnosed and treated as psychotic within the psychiatric system, this paper examines how such experiences may nonetheless function as mystical phenomena. Central to this inquiry is how hearing voices, approached outside a purely pathological framework, may catalyze profound transformation — of the individual and of the unjust systems that produce suffering among people with psychiatric diagnoses. The paper attends to the vulnerabilities these experiences entail: forced treatment, social alienation, stigma, and the epistemic violence of psychiatric diagnosis that dismisses the experiencer's own understanding. It ultimately argues that voice-hearing, as a transformative experience whose full consequences cannot be known in advance, opens pathways toward spiritual connection and collective liberation.

The idea that prāṇāyāma purifies moral faults appears both in several haṭhayoga texts and in earlier accounts of breath control in Dharmaśāstra literature. While prāṇāyāma has been extensively studied as both a physiological and contemplative technique within yoga’s ancillary disciplines, its role as a form of penance has received comparatively little interest. This paper investigates the rationale behind the expiatory role of prāṇāyāma. On what grounds do yoga texts claim that prāṇāyāma purifies sins? What is the mechanism through which prāṇāyāma purifies moral faults? I trace the rationale for the expiatory nature of breath control back to the description of the sacrifice to the fires in the prāyaścitta section of the Jaiminīya Brāhmaṇa. The “elemental” logic grounded in the ritual relations among air, fire, and water present in the Vedic agnihotra offers a useful explanation for the expiatory mechanism of prāṇāyāma in later traditions.

In the body of literature belonging to the Unexcelled Yoga Tantras, the contexts in which the six-phased yoga is practiced include the practices of sevā, the haṭha-yoga, and the stage of completion. In each of these practices, the prāṇāyāma takes different forms that have corresponding results—some being temporary and others ultimate—including the five types of meditative experience, a valid cognition, the purification of the six psychophysical aggregates, and other bodily constituents, praises by bodhisattvas, and the attainment of the deities, such as Amoghasiddhi and others. To speak of the role of prāṇāyāma in the six-phased yoga of the Unexcelled Yoga Tantras, one must uncover its relation to other phases of the six-phased yoga and to a broader, conceptual and practical framework of the given tantra. This presentation intends to do exactly this, and to disclosinge certain commonalities and differences among the practices of prāṇāyāma in the Kālacakratantra and the Guhyasamājatantra.

This presentation investigates the roots of a little-studied form of yoga: examination of the flow of breath within the body’s channels (nāḍī), typically for prognostication. Such practices are generally known today as svarodaya, “divination by the breath” or “breathing prognistication.” Despite its prominence in early-modern yoga as well as Indian Sufism, svarodaya remains a neglected area, perhaps because it sits uneasily within categories such as meditation, posture, and breath-control, and due to its surprising connections to medical and warfare divination. As this presentation examines, svarodaya has its roots in the early Śaiva tantra corpus (circa 6th-9th centuries), in practices for examining the circulation of breath and the soul or life-force in bodily channels for self-knowledge and ritual power. 

Although breath-regulation (prāṇāyāma) occupies a central place in many yoga traditions, its role in Jain thought remains understudied. This paper examines Yaśovijaya’s treatment of prāṇāyāma in his Dvātriṃśaddvātriṃśikā (DD). Yaśovijaya, one of the most influential Jain intellectuals of the seventeenth century, engages Patañjali and Vyāsa, adopting their definitions of inhalation (pūraka), retention (kumbhaka), and exhalation (recaka), and acknowledges the benefits of the practice. He argues that prāṇāyāma is acceptable for those inclined toward breathing practices insofar as it reduces karmically binding activity. Ultimately, however, he redefines it not as a technique of physiological control or as related to prāṇa as vital capacity, but as inner transformation (bhāva) encompassing three main components: (1) the expulsion of attachment, (2) the cultivation of insight, and (3) the stabilization of knowledge. I show how his account strategically reinterprets authoritative yogic discourse to align it with specifically Jain soteriological and ethical commitments.

This paper introduces an eruption of publishing about the gross and subtle body known to classical Buddhist Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna tradition among Tibetan monastics during the so-called “Decade of the Brain” (1990s). Responding to the privileging of the neurosciences and its materialist modeling of mind as entirely reducible to brain, a handful of prominent Tibetan monastic scholars in the PRC and in the refugee diaspora sought to elaborately translate and refuse the neuroscience of the day. In these Tibetan refusals of the brain sciences, not only was classical South and Inner Asian Buddhist knowledge about the subtle body and subtle winds restaged for a new global audience. In the process, the epistemological status of the subtle body came to possess a metonymical power to stand in juxtaposition with the imaginary totalities of the West, science, the Indian secular nation-state, and the erasures and exile of Tibetan civilization.

The idea that prāṇāyāma purifies moral faults appears both in several haṭhayoga texts and in earlier accounts of breath control in Dharmaśāstra literature. While prāṇāyāma has been extensively studied as both a physiological and contemplative technique within yoga’s ancillary disciplines, its role as a form of penance has received comparatively little interest. This paper investigates the rationale behind the expiatory role of prāṇāyāma. On what grounds do yoga texts claim that prāṇāyāma purifies sins? What is the mechanism through which prāṇāyāma purifies moral faults? I trace the rationale for the expiatory nature of breath control back to the description of the sacrifice to the fires in the prāyaścitta section of the Jaiminīya Brāhmaṇa. The “elemental” logic grounded in the ritual relations among air, fire, and water present in the Vedic agnihotra offers a useful explanation for the expiatory mechanism of prāṇāyāma in later traditions.

In the body of literature belonging to the Unexcelled Yoga Tantras, the contexts in which the six-phased yoga is practiced include the practices of sevā, the haṭha-yoga, and the stage of completion. In each of these practices, the prāṇāyāma takes different forms that have corresponding results—some being temporary and others ultimate—including the five types of meditative experience, a valid cognition, the purification of the six psychophysical aggregates, and other bodily constituents, praises by bodhisattvas, and the attainment of the deities, such as Amoghasiddhi and others. To speak of the role of prāṇāyāma in the six-phased yoga of the Unexcelled Yoga Tantras, one must uncover its relation to other phases of the six-phased yoga and to a broader, conceptual and practical framework of the given tantra. This presentation intends to do exactly this, and to disclosinge certain commonalities and differences among the practices of prāṇāyāma in the Kālacakratantra and the Guhyasamājatantra.

This presentation investigates the roots of a little-studied form of yoga: examination of the flow of breath within the body’s channels (nāḍī), typically for prognostication. Such practices are generally known today as svarodaya, “divination by the breath” or “breathing prognistication.” Despite its prominence in early-modern yoga as well as Indian Sufism, svarodaya remains a neglected area, perhaps because it sits uneasily within categories such as meditation, posture, and breath-control, and due to its surprising connections to medical and warfare divination. As this presentation examines, svarodaya has its roots in the early Śaiva tantra corpus (circa 6th-9th centuries), in practices for examining the circulation of breath and the soul or life-force in bodily channels for self-knowledge and ritual power. 

Although breath-regulation (prāṇāyāma) occupies a central place in many yoga traditions, its role in Jain thought remains understudied. This paper examines Yaśovijaya’s treatment of prāṇāyāma in his Dvātriṃśaddvātriṃśikā (DD). Yaśovijaya, one of the most influential Jain intellectuals of the seventeenth century, engages Patañjali and Vyāsa, adopting their definitions of inhalation (pūraka), retention (kumbhaka), and exhalation (recaka), and acknowledges the benefits of the practice. He argues that prāṇāyāma is acceptable for those inclined toward breathing practices insofar as it reduces karmically binding activity. Ultimately, however, he redefines it not as a technique of physiological control or as related to prāṇa as vital capacity, but as inner transformation (bhāva) encompassing three main components: (1) the expulsion of attachment, (2) the cultivation of insight, and (3) the stabilization of knowledge. I show how his account strategically reinterprets authoritative yogic discourse to align it with specifically Jain soteriological and ethical commitments.

This paper introduces an eruption of publishing about the gross and subtle body known to classical Buddhist Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna tradition among Tibetan monastics during the so-called “Decade of the Brain” (1990s). Responding to the privileging of the neurosciences and its materialist modeling of mind as entirely reducible to brain, a handful of prominent Tibetan monastic scholars in the PRC and in the refugee diaspora sought to elaborately translate and refuse the neuroscience of the day. In these Tibetan refusals of the brain sciences, not only was classical South and Inner Asian Buddhist knowledge about the subtle body and subtle winds restaged for a new global audience. In the process, the epistemological status of the subtle body came to possess a metonymical power to stand in juxtaposition with the imaginary totalities of the West, science, the Indian secular nation-state, and the erasures and exile of Tibetan civilization.

The Biafran War/Nigerian Civil War was a deeply contentious ordeal that took place between 1967-1970 and claimed the lives of upwards of 3 million Igbos. Many statements were given in response to this crisis, but none as provocative as that of former US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger who labeled the Igbos the “Jews of West Africa.” This would not be the first nor last time global spectators of the Biafran War would draw comparisons between the atrocities attributed towards the Jews during the Holocaust and the experiences of the Igbos in Biafra. This paper asks in what ways did post-Holocaust consciousness affect international responses to anti-Igbo violence prior to and during the Biafran War (1965-1970) and to what extent did these framings have enduring effects on the Igbos in the post-Biafran epoch?

This paper presents the contours of a new book that charts the necessity of Catholic institutions to know their history and navigate submerged memory, in order to be part of the project of repair today.  Grace of the Ghosts:  A Theology of Institutional Reparation (Fordham University Press, 2025), sets out a roadmap for navigating memories of institutional complicity in the evils of White supremacy that have been death-dealing in the United States.  With micro-histories of some among the ghosts who haunt specific Catholic institutions – of university and parish – the paper details some ways of navigating memories of harm toward institutional reparation.

What does it mean to identify with former East German writer Christa Wolf as scholars in Holocaust studies? Through her elegiac efforts, I argue that we too can begin to confront our complicity in the oppression of others past and present. Focusing on Wolf’s novel Patterns of Childhood, I consider what it has meant for me as an American Jew to see myself mirrored in the life of a former Nazi through Nelly, the Nazi child Wolf’s protagonist once was, a child, like Wolf herself, raised and educated under the Nazi regime. I ask what we might learn about how, at least this one former Nazi child, a writer spent the rest of her life working through her past as it continued to shape an ever-shifting present. To do this, I turn to key moments from chapter 11 of Wolf’s novel, a chapter that begins with the final solution.

This paper examines how railroad circuses shaped religious and cultural narratives of the American West. As one of the most popular forms of entertainment from 1872 to 1920, circuses circulated myths of the West through performances, publicity, and embodied rituals, reaching audiences across North America and beyond. This study explores how circuses commodified Native American life, exoticized non-Christian religions, and staged eclectic religious ceremonies like the one the paper opens with, a memorial service blending a Protestant sermon with Native dances. These spectacles reinforced racial hierarchies and Protestant ideals while simultaneously creating spaces for improvisation and innovation. By tracing the intersections of religion, mobility, and empire, this paper argues that circuses were powerful instruments of U.S. colonialism and myth-making, projecting visions of the West as both wild and morally ordered; a future shaped by ideas of Protestant progress and animated by exoticized spectacle.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’s response to the 1918 flu epidemic provided an opportunity for the church to demonstrate its modern, secular character—and, by implication, its legitimacy as an American religion. By “secular,” I mean that in public, church members separated the category of religion from the category of medicine and subordinated the former to the latter. As they navigated the epidemic, Latter-day Saints strove to embody a vision of modern white American citizenry toward which they had been working since at least their arrival in the Great Basin in 1847. But even in this crucial moment, secularization was uneven. The 1918 flu epidemic, and Latter-day Saints’ responses to it, illuminate a range of ways that Latter-day Saints were modulating their religious practice and working out how to do religion “right” in a modernizing US—while not fully surrendering their identity as a distinctive religious group.

Southern California was a key location for the emergence of the modern anticult movement in the mid-twentieth century. The movement, which began as a loose network of parent support groups that opposed new religious movements they called "cults," was part of a larger debate about the future of religious freedom in the West, and the nation more broadly. California’s history of religious experimentation had fostered a religious diversity that many wanted to continue and expand. Yet, by the mid-twentieth century, the Cold War context and the migration to of the defense industry to California, gave rise to the religious and political conservatism that marked new groups as dangerous. As the anticult movement worked to exclude new religions from constitutional protections, it advanced the project of American Empire building and exemplified the long-standing dialectic between acceptance and opposition in the history of religion in the American West.

This paper examines how boundaries between “religion” and “spirituality” were negotiated and re-negotiated in three interrelated but distinct San Francisco organizations that engaged people with AIDS in the first four years of the epidemic. The three groups overlapped in personnel, purpose, and history. They came together in Ward 5B at San Francisco General, the first hospital ward dedicated exclusively to AIDS. They all engaged in work that could be deemed spiritual, and all had functions that traditionally fall under the rubric of religion. The paper examines how each group claimed and/or disavowed “religion” and “spirituality” in both what it did and how it described itself. It shows that grappling with “spiritual” versus “religious” is not just a question of individual identification but also an organizational grappling with particular tensions in a field, tensions that encourage groups to embrace and/or disavow religion and spirituality internally and in relation to other groups.

“Ecumenical shared ministries” (ESMs) result from two or more congregations merging resources and worshipping together while retaining distinct denominational affiliations (Beardsall et al. 2018). In 2025, I conducted a qualitative study of two ESMs in neighbouring rural communities. Adapting Sarah Dunlop’s method of “narrated photography,” I collected photos of each ESM’s worship space (Dunlop 2024). I then conducted semi-structured interviews to explore how congregants engage in receptive ecumenism to discover “what each tradition might…fruitfully have to learn from the other” (Murray 2008).

My qualitative data suggests that the messy work of receptive ecumenism happens for ESMs through real-time encounters between differently ritualized bodies in a shared worship space. One ESM models receptive ecumenism by bringing differently ritualized bodies into the same space for a shared liturgy. The other ESM rarely engages in receptive ecumenism because differently ritualized bodies take turns using the same space instead of worshipping together in it.

This paper examines how ritual practices emerging from the aftermath of Karbala, particularly lamentation, sermon, and pilgrimage, function as modes of theological production and moral agency in Shii Islam. Centering Zaynab bint Ali’s sermon in Yazid’s court and the ritual traditions that followed it, the paper argues that grief operates not merely as commemoration but as a future-oriented ethical practice that preserves and reconfigures power after mass violence. Drawing on ritual theory, feminist studies of religion, and historical analysis, the paper challenges dominant assumptions that ritual primarily stabilizes tradition or expresses submission. Instead, it demonstrates how Zaynab’s ritualized speech and mourning inaugurate a form of “devotional resistance” in which memory and endurance generate moral authority. By tracing how these practices continue in rituals such as Arbaeen, the paper shows how ritual connects past trauma to future ethical possibility, offering a model for studying ritual as both preservation and transformation.

In this presentation, I explore the role of ritual in a Muslim ethics of community organizing as a means to cultivate solidarity with the Muslim and non-Muslim other. In order to accomplish this, I focus on the “Faithful Fridays” interfaith gatherings held by contemporary American Muslim community organizer IMAN (Inner-city Muslim Action Network) in the Chicago area. Such ritual performances not only cultivate solidarities across religious, racial, and class-based lines; they also function as forms of “prefigurative politics” foreshadowing a world not dominated by state, capitalist, or racial supremacist logics. I unpack the moral imagination cultivated by these performances by drawing on the Qur’anic concept of the barzakh to capture a discursive space which both divides and connects and thus opens up new ways of conceiving the self and other. Consequently, a barzakh moral imagination offers promising insights into how we might understand solidarity.

Rather than look at protests becoming rituals, I here consider a case where ritual as part of protest. I maintain that because of consistent and violent attacks by ICE on protesters in Minneapolis/St. Paul, physical ritual movement became a vital part of protests. 

A resident of the area, and was part of the resistance to ICE agents arrest and detention of citizens. Here, I offer my scholarly observations on events, paired with theory on ritual and protest. This includes reviewing Victor Turner and Richard Schechner’s understanding of ritual and protest, considering theatrical and group components. However, I focus mainly on critical understandings of the use of music and dance in protests. To do so, I describe and examine two specific examples from the Minneapolis ICE protests - Westminster Presbyterian church and the Singing Resistance movement, and Native American dances at memorial sites. 

This paper will examine the role of writing, printing, mass media, and the internet in the evolution of religion to develop a systems theory of new religious movements. I will place a critical analysis of Niklas Luhmann’s sociological systems theory of religion in dialogue with theories of NRMs and philosophy of religion to show how the systems of meaning we describe as religion/religious develop through the material technologies we use to communicate. NRMs can be said to emerge and evolve in proportion to the degree of complexity needed to access and sustain the communication of a novel system of meaning for individuals-in-community relative to the selection pressures of a communication environment. A systems theory of NRMs can better explain why religion will likely never disappear but only change in form as we find new ways to form systems of meaning through the materials and infrastructure we use to communicate. 

This paper positions Speakers’ Corner as a communal ritual space that reifies and celebrates Freedom of Speech every Sunday afternoon. It is an active and functioning as a contemporary hybrid cultic milieu in which New Religious Movements (NRMs), dawah and counter‑dawah, apologetics, conspiratorial worldviews, and emerging forms of new religiosity intersect within a hybrid street–platform environment. Drawing on classic sociological theory including Goffman’s interaction rituals, Habermas’s public sphere, and Campbell’s cultic milieu, the paper illustrates how ritualised performances of Freedom of Speech generate publics and counter‑publics whose exchanges circulate globally via livestreams and short‑form clips. Ethnographic fieldwork (April–June 2025), combined with historical contextualisation, visual sociology and online mapping, traces how confrontational formats, testimonial arcs, and ‘click moments’ become mobile, monetisable, and morally charged. Speakers’ Corner continues an iconic site for examining boundary‑challenging religious innovation, where NRM actors and seekers operate alongside political and heterodox movements. Speaker’s Corner offers a unique vantage point for understanding how democratic values, public order, heterodoxy, and emerging forms of religiosity are being reconfigured into hybrid futures.

This paper analyzes how certain strands of Christian apologetics function sociologically as mechanisms of deviance labeling that generate religious stigma and social exclusion toward minority Christian communities. Drawing on classical theories of deviance and stigmatization developed by Howard Becker, Edwin Lemert, Frank Tannenbaum, and Erving Goffman, the paper argues that apologetic discourse associated with the evangelical anti-cult movements of the 1970s transformed theological disagreement into social deviance through symbolic power and ideological boundary-making. It further traces the transnational circulation of these stigmatizing narratives, showing how labels in North American anti-cult discourse were later appropriated as “evil cults” (xiejiao) within the political and legal framework of 1980s China to justify repression of underground Christian communities. Qualitative evidence from the testimonies of persecuted Christians illustrates the lived consequences of such labeling. The paper also examines how digital media amplify these dynamics by accelerating the circulation of stigmatizing narratives across transnational religious networks.

Based on first-hand research experiences in the field of new religious studies, this paper attempts to identify and analyze some of the changing conditions that have confronted researchers attempting to conduct field work in new religious movements (NRMs) over the last fifty years. Four major conditions are identified: i) the rise of “cult-watching groups” (CAG) in an increasingly global “anticult movement” (ACM); ii) the rise of institutional research ethics boards; iii) the advent of the Internet in the mid-1990s; iv) media treatment of NRMs. While these four changing conditions have, in some ways, contributed new methods and avenues of access to the field of NRM studies, this paper will focus on their negative impacts on the research field. Citing from research methods studies, and providing examples of researchers’ experiences in the field, this study will attempt to demonstrate how these four factors can impede or limit research access, delay projects, and divert the focus away from longitudinal research and “pure ethnography” towards short-term projects responding to religious freedom issues, legal cases, and human rights concerns.