In-person November Annual Meeting 2026 Program Book

This paper explores how early nineteenth-century American evangelicals combined demographic data (“missionary intelligence”) with eschatological speculation to construct politically potent imagined futures. Focusing on northeastern Congregational and Presbyterian evangelicals, including Lyman Beecher and the leaders of the American Education Society, it examines anxieties surrounding western expansion. Evangelicals avidly collected statistical data on religious demographics, fearing that a severe lack of educated ministers would lead to the dominance of “paganism,” “infidelity,” and “Romanism” in the rapidly growing West. Projecting these trend lines forward, they envisioned a fallen republic that had been divested of its Protestant character. When this demographic panic collided with a dominant eschatology that identified the pope as the Antichrist, it catalyzed intense missionary fervor and nativist anguish. Ultimately, the paper demonstrates how the potent synthesis of statistical trend lines and apocalyptic schemas could lead evangelicals toward aggressive political activism and mob violence.

This paper draws a direct line between Confederate nationalist ideology and contemporary Christian nationalisms in America. Although the absence of the slavery question in our contemporary context may obscure their connection, I argue that there is a persistent ideological tradition. Both movements claim an affinity with the Revolutionary era; both affirm that the nation exists in a covenant relationship with God, that democracy and secularization threaten the social order, and that chosen leaders embody God’s greater purposes for the nation. Drawing on antebellum sermons, speeches, and secession convention records, this paper traces how Confederate leaders developed a theocratic nationalism that was not defeated on the battlefield but was preserved within postbellum evangelical communities. It then examines how the ingredients of Confederate nationalism are animating contemporary Christian nationalisms. Finally, this paper asks what this historical continuity reveals about the likely trajectory of evangelical Christian nationalisms in the current political moment. 

This paper examines how divergent American evangelical eschatological frameworks generate distinct visions of and political responses to a “future China.” Existing scholarship on American evangelicals and China often focuses on strategic engagement during the Reform and Opening period, neglecting how internal theological diversity and competing genealogies shaped divergent evangelical responses to Sino-American affairs. This paper compares how Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell developed distinct missionary and political strategies toward China. Although both operated within a premillennial framework, they articulated different geopolitical visions of China’s future, either as a potential Christian power or as an apocalyptic threat. Drawing on underutilized archival materials from the Billy Graham Center and the Jerry Falwell Library, the paper highlights how competing evangelical visions of “future China” informed divergent forms of transnational activism and contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the complex role American evangelicals play in mediating contemporary Sino-American relations.

The Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., through its association with the Christian Right and its apologetic approach to American Protestant history, not only recapitulates past historiographical conversations regarding the relationship between Christianity and the United States, but also asserts a particular future, a “Christian Right” utopia, wherein Christianity and “civilization” are discursively intertwined with each other. The narrative pushed forward by the Museum of the Bible — a narrative that legitimizes a specific memory of the early United States and the nation’s relationship with evangelical Protestantism — mirrors older, nineteenth-century accounts of American religious history, mainly those of Robert Baird and Daniel Dorchester. Through the narratives of “labor,” of “civilization,” of “differentiation,” and of “information,” the Museum of the Bible depicts the Protestant missional spirit as inextricable from Christianity, celebrates the resulting connections between Christianity and “civilization,” and proclaims a new (and old) future for the Christian Right. 

I argue that carrying a firearm enables evangelical Christians in the twenty-first century to build a particular kind of future. Armed evangelicals imagine a future in which they and their loved ones will encounter a deadly threat, especially in the form of a stranger armed with a gun. In order to counter this threat, Christians envisage themselves as capable protectors, but only if they are armed. Armed evangelical Christians imaginatively build their future through three modes: discourse about wielding their gun against evil on behalf of the innocent, training their attention to detect threats by imagining them in advance, and regular embodied practice with the firearm.

This paper takes up the question of the doubling of the body of Jesus in Barabbas and Jesus in the Mark's gospel narrative, and situates this doubling in the context of the destruction of Jerusalem in the wake of which the text is written. It shows how the destruction of Jerusalem serves for the Flavians as the vindication of their rule and, for Mark, the vindication of Christainity. Reading this site with Barabbas' return in Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, I suggest we might see this primal scene of supersession as necessarily predicated upon the staging of a civil war out of which a sovereign body emerges. Showing the way Schmitt reads these two sites, I suggest that ingredient to the production of "new-Schmittianisms" is the production of civil war superseded. 

Few stories in the Book of Genesis have generated as much theological and philosophical reflection on the human condition as the story of Eve. Interpretations of the narrative have traditionally emphasized disobedience and the theological problem of the Fall, while feminist scholarship has highlighted Eve’s association with knowledge and moral awareness. Less attention has been given to the way the narrative depicts the emergence of a future-oriented structure of human existence. Drawing on phenomenological accounts of temporality developed by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, this paper argues that Eve’s act marks the moment when human life becomes oriented toward possibilities that do not yet exist. By acting on an imagined future, Eve inaugurates a form of existence structured by projection, uncertainty, and responsibility for what has not yet occurred. Read in this way, the Genesis narrative reflects how human existence becomes historical and ethically responsible for the future.

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in expanding political theology beyond its roots in the Christian tradition. This paper investigates two case studies from the Islamic tradition, corresponding to the two main strains of the field. On the side of politically-engaged theology, it focuses on Hamid Dabashi’s Islamic Liberation Theology: Resisting the Empire (Routledge, 2008), and on the side of genealogical inquiry into transformations of religion in a secular world, it takes up Faisal Devji’s Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam (Yale, 2025). Both explicitly engage with their Christian forebears—Gustavo Gutiérrez and Carl Schmitt, respectively—making them particularly fruitful interlocutors. Though they come from very different perspectives and take very different approaches, both ultimately show that the problems that Christianity has bequeathed to modernity remain problems for an Islamic political theology as well.

This paper rehabilitates a central problem for philosophy of revelation brought into relief by the responsibility for transmitting religious beliefs and practices to future generations. Transmission is a communicative endeavor essential to the task of religion. However, the concept of "revelation," philosophically considered, resists the possibility of communication in the first place by exceeding the conditions of communicability. As such, revealed religion cannot expect to transmit the revelation that constitutes it to future generations by legitimate means. Thus, under what immanent conditions might divine transcendence appear as communicable without violating divine transcendence? I argue that epistemological and phenomenological approaches to revelation have not adequately answered this question. I argue  that philosophical hermeneutics in a Gadamerian vein offers conceptual tools for conceiving of language as the medium required for a robust notion of revelation as communicable. Gadamer's philosophy of transmission (Überlieferung) trades on concepts of transcendence that can countenance religious revelation. 

After the passage of the Alien Land Law of 1913 in California, the well known statute excluding Asians from land ownership as “aliens ineligible for citizenship,” South Asian migrant farmers found a variety of contractual loopholes to keep their lands and livelihoods. While scholars have written many social histories of these creative workarounds, this paper attempts to understand how they shaped Asian American religion -- specifically, Asian American Islam. Using archival materials, I examine how this period’s land lease contracts between South Asian migrants, white lawyers, and white business people produced bureaucratic intimacies that were normatively rich and socially complex, shaping these individuals’ deeply personal modes of relating to land, ownership, and the state. The paper will show that, by giving early South Asian Muslim migrants an American secular vocabulary of economics, these legal encounters were crucial in their story of immigrant religious formation. 

This paper introduces the concept of "developmental orthodoxy" to analyze how American law governs children's futures by sorting developmental trajectories into orthodox and heretical categories. Through a close reading of Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972) alongside Tennessee's 2023 ban on gender-affirming care for minors, I trace how the figure of the child operates in legal reasoning as a site where the state's investment in futurity becomes visible. In Yoder, the Court celebrated Amish parents' right to withdraw children from formal education because their alternative schooling produced "good farmers and good citizens"; in Tennessee, the state overrides parental authority to prevent treatments that "might encourage minors to become disdainful of their sex." Drawing on Lauren Berlant's work on citizenship and futurity and Lee Edelman's concept of reproductive futurism, I argue that both cases reveal the state functioning as arbiter of which children, and which futures, merit legal protection.

How does immigration law shape migrant subjectivities? The paper examines whether and how migrants’ engagement with the asylum institution brings about changes in their religious practices and self-understandings, drawing on ethnographic research among ethnic Korean migrants from China who applied for asylum in the U.S. as Christians. The paper unpacks the black box through which immigration law shapes migrant subjectivities in variable and dynamic ways by focusing on their future-making. Various intermediaries and transnational migrant communities provide competing cultural scripts, creating frictions in migrants’ future-making. Whether and how these frictions are coordinated shape migrants’ self-transformation. The paper demonstrates how the interplay between asylum law, Korean immigrant churches, and transnational migrant communities shaped whether Korean Chinese migrants applied for asylum as Christians, how they organized the prolonged refugee status determination process, and how they made futures out of it, refusing or embracing Christian conversion as a desirable and plausible future.

This paper examines how contemporary school discipline laws shape the futures of disabled children in the United States. Placing recent policies such as Texas House Bill 6 in conversation with the historical precedent of Buck v. Bell (1927), it argues that legal frameworks governing school discipline can translate disability-related differences into behavioral deviance, legitimizing exclusion in the name of institutional order. While Buck v. Bell sought to regulate the reproductive futures of disabled persons, modern disciplinary regimes increasingly govern their educational futures through suspension, removal, and alternative placements.