Browsing by Subject "Secularism"

My dissertation interrogates the figure of the priestly charlatan in colonial India. It begins in a theoretical register by arguing that the unmasking of charlatans serves as a metonym for the secularizing procedures of modernity. Tales of charlatans' exposure by secularist skeptics promise a disenchanted world freed from the ill-gotten influence of sham divines; such tales evacuate the immanent frame of charismatic god-men, thereby allowing the extension and consolidation of secular power. I trace the trope of charlatanic exposure, beginning with Enlightenment anxieties about "priestcraft," continuing on to nineteenth century criticisms of religion, and then making a lateral move to colonial India. I suggest that by the 1830s it had become difficult for many English critics to extricate the problem of priestly imposture from the broader problematic of empire and, more specifically, from the specter of the "crafty brahmin." I track the cultural crosscurrents that conjoined English and Indian anticlericalisms, not only to insist on the centrality of colonial thinkers to the constitution of modernity, but also to reconsider modernity's putative secularity. The "anticlerical modernity" that I identify brings religious and secular skeptics together in a shared war on sacerdotal charisma, best observed at the interstices of empire.

The dissertation disperses the intellectual lineage of the "imposture theory of religion" by rerouting it through colonial India. The imposture theory, or the notion that religion is but a ruse concocted by crafty priests to dupe gullible masses, was central to the emergence of secular modernity and its mistrust of religion. Closely associated with the English and French Enlightenments, it was also pervasive in British polemics against Indian religions. My dissertation demonstrates how in its colonial redeployment the imposture theory came to abut Indic imaginaries of religious illusion, ranging from folkloric spoofs of gurus' authority to philosophical debates about the ontological status of "maya." Starting from religious controversies of the colonial era, my interrogation of Indic illusion extends from the ninth century philosopher Shankaracharya to the sixteenth century saint Vallabhacharya to the twentieth century guru Osho. Its focus, however, is on three nineteenth century religious reformers: Karsandas Mulji, Dayanand Saraswati, and H.P Blavatsky. Through archival research, textual analysis (in Hindi, Gujarati, and English), and theoretical inquiry, I insinuate these three colonial thinkers into the history of the imposture theory of religion. In doing so, my aim is to contribute to scholarship on the genealogy of religion, particularly in colonial contexts.

This dissertation examines the relationship between religion and higher education in the United States through analyses of the religious histories of four distinct educational institutions in North Carolina’s Research Triangle—Duke University, Meredith College, North Carolina Central University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It places three seemingly contradictory scholarly representations of this relationship in conversation with one another. The first, represented by evangelical historians George Marsden and John Sommerville, claims that American higher education has come to be characterized by exclusive secularism. The second, represented by scholars of education, including Tricia Seifert, Lewis Schlosser, and Sherry Watt et al. claims by contrast that Christian privilege continues to obstruct the full inclusion of religious and non-religious minorities. And a third, represented by Rhonda and Jake Jacobsen, contends that historical Protestant and secularist predominance have been transcended by inclusive pluralism in the “postsecular” 21st century. This dissertation draws on archival research, participant observation, interviews, quantitative survey analysis, and secondary sources to demonstrate how Protestant, secular, and pluralist forces have coexisted and interacted throughout these four institutions’ histories. It illuminates how their campus religious climates have evolved in distinct ways through contingent interactions among these forces conditioned by a variety of institutional identity factors, including race, gender, affiliation, prestige, and geographical reach. As a result, we see that the relationship between religion and higher education is not uniformly characterized by either Christian privilege, exclusive secularism, or inclusive pluralism. Distinct institutional trajectories shape coexisting forms of privilege, secularism, and pluralism that interact in specific contexts, producing unique campus religious climates that shape undergraduate identity formation.

While the field of religious studies increasingly turns toward material culture as a counterbalance to understandings of religion that privilege questions of individual belief, theology, and text, influential histories of atheism in the West remain largely confined to the mode of intellectual history. This is understandable when atheism is commonly understood first-and-foremost as an idea about the nonexistence of God. But like religion, atheism is not a purely intellectual position; it is rooted in interpersonal emotional exchanges, material objects and media, and historically-contextual social communities. This dissertation uses tools from the materialist turns in both religious studies and media studies to explore the history of American atheism and its reliance on non-intellectual and non-rational forces. Drawing on theories of affect, visual culture, and aesthetics, it argues that atheism in America has always been more than an idea. In particular, it uses different media forms as lenses to examine the material bases of evolving forms of American disbelief from the 19th century to today. Using archival records of nineteenth-century print media and political cartoons, transcripts and audio-recordings of radio broadcasts during the mid-twentieth-century, and digital ethnography and discourse analysis on contemporary Internet platforms, this dissertation argues that American irreligion has often eschewed the rational in favor of emotional and material strategies for defining a collective identity. Each chapter highlights different metaphors that have been enabled by print, broadcast, and digital media – metaphors that American unbelievers have used to complicate the understanding of atheism as simply a set of beliefs about the nature of reality.