Doctor of Philosophy in Religion - The History of Religions in America

History of Religions in America The study of religion in the U.S. has traditionally focused on church history and has organized its historical archives and questions through the normative lenses of Catholic empire in the New World and the dominant Protestant tropes of the primacy of the Bible, the Puritan City on the Hill, the notion of a manifest destiny, and numerous civil religious themes (think, for example, of the In God We Trust motto, officially established in 1956). But this, of course, is only one way of studying religions in the Americas. The graduate area of History of Religions in America takes up a different lens, one at once deeply historical and radically comparative. While paying very close attention to the biblical roots and normative European Christian traditions that did in fact come to dominate the public life, thought and rhetoric of the culture, this area of study privileges no particular religious narrative or form of religious experience. It does not see history as linear, but as circular, taking seriously the hermeneutical loop of the future of the past, that is, the awareness that future peoples read the past in ways that past peoples could not and did not, so that the future changes the past, and the past changes the future of religions in America. Thus, this area of study pays close attention to the concepts of the present past (the persistent return, uptake and recalibrating of the past to benefit the present religious communities) and revelatory alignment (aligning the past with new revelatory experiences).

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