The Abhidharmakośabhāṣya (Treasury of Metaphysics with Self-Commentary) is a pivotal treatise on early Buddhist thought composed around the 4th or 5th century by the Indian Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu. This work elucidates the buddha’s teachings as synthesized and interpreted by the early Buddhist Sarvāstivāda school (“the theory that all [factors] exist”), while recording the major doctrinal polemics that developed around them, primarily those points of contention with the Sautrāntika system of thought (“followers of the scriptures”). Employing the methodology and terminology of the Buddhist Abhidharma system, the Abhidharmakośabhāṣya offers a detailed analysis of fundamental doctrines, such as early Buddhist theories of mind, cosmology, the workings of karman, meditative states and practices, and the metaphysics of the self. One of its unique features is the way it presents the opinions of a variety of Buddhist and Brahminical schools that were active in classical India in Vasubandhu’s time. The work contains nine chapters (the last of which is considered to have been appended to the first eight), which proceed from a description of the unawakened world via the path and practices that are conducive to awakening and ultimately to the final spiritual attainments which constitute the state of awakening. In its analysis of the unawakened situation, it thus covers the elements which make up the material and mental world of sentient beings, the wholesome and unwholesome mental states that arise in their minds, the structure of the cosmos, the metaphysics of action (karman) and the way it comes into being, and the nature of dispositional attitudes and dormant mental afflictions. In its treatment of the path and practices that lead to awakening, the treatise outlines the Sarvāstivāda understanding of the methods of removing defilements through the realization of the four noble truths and the stages of spiritual cultivation. With respect to the awakened state, the Abhidharmakośabhāṣya gives a detailed description of the different types of knowledge and meditational states attained by practitioners who reach the highest stages of the path.
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Abhidharmakośabhāṣya (Treasury of Metaphysics with Self-Commentary)
Oren Hanner
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Abhisamayālaṃkāra (Ornament for Clear Realization)
James B. Apple
The Abhisamayālaṃkāra (Ornament for clear realization) is an instructional treatise on the Prajñāpāramitā, or Perfect Wisdom, whose authorship is traditionally attributed to Maitreyanātha (c. 350 ce). As a technical treatise, the Abhisamayālaṃkāra outlines within its 273 verses the instructions, practices, paths, and stages of realization to omniscient buddhahood mentioned in Prajñāpāramitā scriptures. In its abridged description, the Abhisamayālaṃkāra furnishes a detailed summary of the path that is regarded as bringing out the “concealed meaning” (sbas don, garbhyārtha) of Prajñāpāramitā. The Abhisamayālaṃkāra contains eight chapters of subject matter, with a summary of them as the ninth chapter. The eight subjects (padārtha) of the eight chapters (adhikāra) correspond to eight clear realizations (abhisamaya) that represent the knowledges, practices, and result of Prajñāpāramitā. The Abhisamayālaṃkāra’s eight clear realizations are types of knowledge and practices for bodhisattvas (“buddhas-in-training”) to achieve buddhahood set forth within the system of the five paths (lam lnga, *pañcamārga) common to Indian abhidharma and Yogācāra literature. The first three clear realizations are types of knowledge that comprise Perfect Wisdom. Total Omniscience, or the wisdom of all aspects (sarvākārajñatā, rnam pa thams cad mkhyen pa nyid), is regarded as the fundamental wisdom and the central concept of Prajñāpāramitā. Total Omniscience is direct, unmediated knowledge that exactly understands the manner of reality to its fullest possible extent in all its aspects. Path-omniscience (mārgajñatā, lam shes nyid) comprises the Buddhist path systems of śrāvakas, pratyekabuddhas, and bodhisattvas mastered by bodhisattvas. Empirical Omniscience (vastujñāna, gzhi shes) cognizes empirical objects in conditioned existence that are to be abandoned. It correlates to knowledge that is comprehended by śrāvakas and pratyekabuddhas. The path to buddhahood itself and the detailed means of its application are covered in the Abhisamayālaṃkāra by the fourth through seventh clear realizations. The fourth chapter is devoted to the realization of wisdom of all aspects (sarvākārābhisaṃbodha, rnam rdzogs sbyor ba), a yogic practice that enables a bodhisattva to gain a cognition of all the aspects of the three types of omniscience. The fifth realization is the summit of full understanding (mūrdhābhisamaya, rtse sbyor), whereby yogic practices reach the culmination of cognizing emptiness. The sixth chapter defines the gradual full understanding (anupūrvābhisamaya, mthar gyis sbyor ba) of the three forms of omniscience. The seventh abhisamaya clarifies the “instantaneous realization” (ekakṣaṇābhisamaya) that occurs at the final moment right before buddhahood. Abhisamayas four through seven are known as “the four methods of realization” of the three types of knowledge. The eighth realization, and last subject in the Abhisamayālaṃkāra, is the realization of the dharma body (dharmakāyābhisamaya). In this way, the first three realizations describe the cognitive attainments of buddhas, the middle four realizations discuss the methods that take the cognitive attainments as their object, and the eighth realization describes the qualities and attainments of the dharma body, the resultant body of buddhas. The treatise was extensively commented upon in Indian Buddhism and has been widely studied in Tibetan forms of Buddhism up to the present day.
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Aboriginal Religions in Australia
David Moore
Aboriginal Religions are the Indigenous religions of Australia. There are a diverse range of religions throughout Australia, with religion defined as the “transmission of authoritative traditions.” Despite change and disruption in the past two and a half centuries of European occupation and colonization, Aboriginal Religions retain their distinctiveness and vitality. This article explores some of the common aspects of the Aboriginal Religions of Australia. These are the importance of the land and the sacred places of that land. Aboriginal Religions can best be researched by phenomenological approaches which are based upon language.
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African American Islam
Herbert Berg
The first Muslims arrived in the American colonies and later in the United States as African slaves. Although a few and noteworthy Muslim American slaves left written records of their lives, Islam was largely extinguished by the white slave owners. Sectarian and racial forms of Islam were introduced into the United States, particularly within urban African American communities, by Ahmadiyya missionaries and the Moorish Science Temple. The rise of the Nation of Islam under Wali Fard Muhammad and Elijah Muhammad and its bifurcation under the latter’s son, Warith Deen Mohammed, and Louis Farrakhan deserve special attention, as do the initial appeal of the Nation of Islam’s racial formulation of Islam and, decades later, the willingness of most of its members to move to Sunni orthodoxy after Elijah Muhammad’s death. The second major, though not entirely separate, strand of Islam in the United States, though often interacting or competing with the first, comes from Muslim immigrants. This group brings unique issues, such as living in a largely Christian society, competing with the Nation of Islam, refuting stereotypes in the media and popular culture, finding a political voice, and coping with post-9/11 Islamophobia, all leading to the consideration of the prospects for a uniquely “American Islam” that reflects U.S. pluralism and (supposed) separation of “church and state.”
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African Americans and Religion
Sylvester A. Johnson
Beginning with trans-Atlantic slavery, which forced hundreds of thousands of people into what is presently the United States, religion among African Americans consistently featured a complex of efforts toward innovation, preservation, and agential intervention rooted in efforts toward survival against structures of racial domination. Social factors including slavery, black responses to a range of political conflicts, influences of immigration, and the varieties of genealogies that have constituted religious formations among African Americans contributed to the creation of formal Christian denominations, intentional communities of Orisha, and transnational movements of Islam. Also important are the insurgent challenges that African Americans have proffered as a rejoinder to social oppression. But this progressive tendency has been paralleled by sharply conservative religious formations that check any easy generalization of African American religions as being predisposed toward social justice movements. Also important are social sources of autonomous church formation, the role of Black Nationalism, anticolonial forms of religion, and Yoruba revivalism of the mid-20th century.
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Agency, Voluntarism, and Predestination in American Religion
Peter J. Thuesen
In the free marketplace of religious ideas that is the United States, Americans have disagreed over many things. The form of church government, the proper way to worship, the extent of the scriptural canon, and the limits of racial and gender inclusion are but a few of the questions on which the nation’s majority Christians have erected boundaries among themselves, to say nothing of their differences with non-Christians. Yet an equally important source of denominational divisions has been the nexus of issues surrounding agency (humans’ freedom to act as they choose), voluntarism (defined here as the quest for salvation through this-worldly action), and predestination (the otherworldly question of whether God predetermines each person’s eternal destiny). Particularly contentious has been the question of predestination, especially the problem of whether God elects persons for salvation conditionally (based on their foreseen faith or merit) or unconditionally (based solely on his inscrutable wisdom). In the 16th and 17th centuries, this debate cut across the Reformation divide, with each position represented among both Catholic and Protestant scholastics. The New England Puritan clergy were the first major bearers of this scholastic tradition, which abounded with paradox and logical distinctions. The intensity of Puritanism’s predestinarian psychology generated a widespread anti-Calvinist backlash in the 19th century and contributed to the growth of a number of upstart denominations, including Methodists, Universalists, Restoration Movement “Christians,” Mormons, Adventists, and Christian Scientists. Debates over free will and predestination also bred factionalism and even threatened schism in several denominations, including the Congregationalists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Baptists. Less frequently, non-Christians weighed in, occasionally embracing the trope of anti-Calvinism as a way to demonstrate their own traditions’ compatibility with American freedom. By the early 21st century, though the rise of nondenominational megachurches and an increase in “nones” (people with no religious identification) had weakened the hold of traditional doctrines on many Americans, the tension between voluntarism and predestination remained basic to theism as it has been for millennia.
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The Age of Revolutions
Conrad L. Donakowski
A variety of economic, ideological, aesthetic, and nationalist forces shape Christian worship in its varied manifestations today. Historical perspectives and areas of knowledge which are too often discussed in compartmentalized fashion are presented here as acting with and on each other and often serving each other’s purposes. Liturgical, musical, artistic, and architectural expressions are shown to be inextricably bound not only to theology, philosophy, and ecclesial hierarchy but also to political and socioeconomic structural change, technological innovation, and—not least—the culture and the human need for authentic spiritual experience.
The Enlightenment “Age of Reason,” Romanticism, the nation-state, and the Industrial Revolution from the 17th through the 19th centuries affected religious practices that were the only mass medium that reached into every town, house, and heart. Connections are established with not only overtly religious events such as urban Evangelism, preservation of old architecture, the Oxford movement, and tradition versus innovation but also socialistic communal experiments and ethnic conflict among US immigrants.
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The Aḥmadiyya Movement in Islam
Yohanan Friedmann
The Aḥmadiyya Movement in Islam is a modern Muslim messianic movement established in 1889 by Ghulām Aḥmad in Qādiyān, a town in the Indian Punjab province. The Aḥmadī Movement became one of the most controversial and most active movements in modern Islam. The movement was accused of rejecting the Muslim dogma asserting the finality of Muḥammad’s prophethood, and therefore aroused fierce opposition of the Sunnī Muslim mainstream. After the partition of India in 1947, the Aḥmadī issue became a major constitutional problem in Pakistan. The Sunnī Muslim mainstream demanded the formal exclusion of the Aḥmadīs from the Muslim fold. This objective was attained in 1974: against fierce opposition of the Aḥmadīs, the Pakistani parliament adopted a constitutional amendment declaring them non-Muslims. In 1984, within the framework of the general trend of Islamization in Pakistan, a presidential “Ordinance no. XX of 1984” transformed the religious observance of the Aḥmadīs into a criminal offense, punishable by three years of imprisonment and a fine. Following its promulgation, the headquarters of the Aḥmadī Movement moved from Rabwa (in Pakistan) to London.
The article explains the Aḥmadī interpretation of the dogma relating to the finality of Muḥammad’s prophethood, the reinterpretation of the jihād idea and the substantial change that it introduced into the Muslim beliefs concerning Jesus. It also describes the ideological roots of the split between the Qādiyānī and Lāhorī sections of the movement. A substantial part of the article is devoted to the expansion of the movement in numerous countries of the world.
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Ainu Religion
Takeshi Kimura
The Ainu people are indigenous to Japan (the term Ainu means “human”). They have lived mainly in Hokkaido (called Ainu mosir by the Ainu people) and the Tokyo Metropolitan area. Previously, they also lived in Sakhalin (formerly Karafuto) and the Kuril Islands (including the Chishima Islands). In the early 21st century, aspects of the Ainu people’s social lives were no different from those of other Japanese people because of historical colonization and forced cultural assimilation. However, Ainu religious practices have changed dramatically. The historical influences that have formed the Ainu culture and religion have been debated from various perspectives.
There are two main external influences on the historical formation of the Ainu religion. One is Okhotsk cultural influences, since similar designs are found among the Ainu and some ethnic minorities along the Amur River in the Siberian area, and the other is Japanese cultural influence.
Admittedly, the term religion is not appropriate to describe the Ainu religion and spirituality, which is based on the Ainu people’s close relationship with the kamuy (gods, deities) world through nature and by performing rituals and reciting sacred narratives. Ainu religion and spirituality was the fundamental principle guiding their lives as hunter- gatherers. At any specific historical moment, Ainu religion represents the accumulated social and historical expressions of the Ainu people accommodating and negotiating with traditional, inherited religious symbols and notions.
Aspects of the Ainu religion include domestic rituals of prayer to the goddess of fire, rituals for ancestral spirits, designs of clothes, tattooing, dancing and music, oral narratives, ritual hunting and communal ceremonies, shamanistic practices, and funeral rites. There are gendered aspects of the Ainu life and religion. While the Ainu men were responsible for offering prayers and performing these rituals, the Ainu women were known for shamanism and narrating kamuy-yukar, songs of kamuy, and offering prayers to ancestral spirits.
The Ainu religion is known for its ritual killing of a bear, that is, Iyomante in Ainu language. Iyomantemeans “sending it off,” signifying that the ritual sends the soul of the ritually slain animal back to the world of kamuy (deity or spirit). In order to grasp what it means, it is important to pay close attention to the Ainu’s indigenous religious notions about the relationship between kamuy and animals. Animal bodies or animal flesh are gifts for humans which kamuy embodies or wears in visiting the human world. Iyomante is often translated into “bear ceremony” in English or Japanese, but it is important to grasp the significance of the fact that the Ainu people use the term kamuy for both “bear” and “deity or spirit.” The Ainu people use the term Iyomante not only for the ritual killing of a bear, but also for ritual killings of other animals, such as a fox and an owl.
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The Alawis
Stephan Procházka
The ʿAlawis are adherents of an Islamic sect, the origin of which can be traced back to 9th-century Iraq. They are an offshoot of early Shiah Islam with ancient Iranian, Christian, and Gnostic influences. Outsiders often call them “Nusayri,” after the sect’s founder Ibn Nusayr. Practically all ʿAlawis are Arabs. Their total number is about four million, among which some 2.5 million reside in Syria, where they constitute roughly 12 percent of the population. Many ʿAlawi beliefs and rites are still kept secret by the community, being revealed only to initiate male members. One key element in their faith is the belief in a divine triad that has manifested itself to the ʿAlawi community in seven cycles. Other characteristics are an extraordinary veneration for Muhammad’s son-in-law ʿAli, the belief in the transmigration of the soul, and a very large number of holy shrines, which are frequent in all regions settled by ʿAlawis. Because of the esoteric nature of the ʿAlawi religion and the scarcity of authentic written sources, many details of their creed are subjects of vigorous public and scholarly discussion.
For many centuries, the ʿAlawis were an economically weak, socially marginalized, and persecuted group whose heartland was western Syria. The public rise of the community began with the establishment of the French mandate over Syria after World War I and reached its zenith when the ʿAlawi Hafiz al-Assad became president of Syria in 1971. Since then, the disproportionate political and economic influence of the ʿAlawis in Syria has fueled confessional conflicts with the Sunni majority, which culminated in the civil war that began in 2011.
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The Alevis
Gisela Procházka-Eisl
The Alevis are a religious community on the periphery of Shia Islam. The name “Alevi” means “Adherents of ʿAli,” alluding to Muhammad’s son-in-law and cousin ʿAli ibn Abi Talib, who enjoys extraordinary veneration among Alevis. Alevism was developed in Central Anatolia during the 13th century by itinerant Muslim mystics. It includes elements of pre-Islamic Turkish shamanism and aspects of mainstream Shia Islam, which influenced it through cultural contacts with Safavid Iran. Alevism never was a unified and homogeneous community but has always had a variety of sub-groups. For centuries Alevis practiced their rites in secret, which created suspicion and rumor among Sunnite Muslims. Today’s Alevis still have to struggle with this distrust, and are often regarded as heretics by the Sunnites. The designation “Alevi” came into use in the early 20th century as a collective term for a number of religious groups such as Bektaşi, Tahtacı, and Abdal, and today is used instead of the former, pejorative term Kızılbaş (“Red-Heads”). The Alevis are the largest religious minority group in the Republic of Turkey, where their estimated number is around 15 million. Large Alevi groups also reside in the Balkan states as well as in Central and Western Europe, particularly Germany and Austria. Roughly two-thirds of the Alevis are Turkish speakers. The other third speak Kurdish and Zazaki.
In the 1980s, the community underwent the so-called “Alevi revival,” a process of exposure and openness that can be partly explained as a reaction against the re-Islamization of Turkish society. Today Alevis perform their rites and express their beliefs openly.
Although they share certain features with them, the Alevis should not be confused with the Alawis (Nusayris), who live in southern Turkey and Syria and who are all Arabic speakers.
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Alternative Religious Movements and Race in America
Emily Suzanne Clark
Alternative religious movements have played a significant role in American history. There is no easy definition for these types of groups; their ideas and practices vary. One clear commonality, though, is their development on the sociocultural margins. Thus, inherent in alternative religious movements is a critique of dominant culture, and this offers a powerful means of engaging issues of race in America. Other groups, however, choose to echo prevailing racial ideas as a means of making themselves mainstream. The typical narrative of American religious history is white and Protestant, and alternative religious movements have provided both criticism and approval of that story.
While a close look at every alternative religious movement would be impossible, even an abbreviated exploration is revealing. During the antebellum period the question of slavery and the white supremacy that supported it prompted alternative religious movements to ask questions about equality. While many Shakers and Spiritualists recognized value in all, other groups, like the Mormons, encoded contemporary racial assumptions in their early theology. Throughout the 19th and into the 20th century, African Americans and Native Americans criticized white supremacy by offering alternative explanations of humanity’s history and destiny. The 1890s Ghost Dance movement envisioned an Indian paradise devoid of whites, and in the early 20th century black alternative movements in northern cities emphasized the religious significance of their blackness. Though these groups criticized the white supremacy surrounding them, others continued to emphasize the superiority of whiteness. In the latter part of the 20th century, many Americans associated racialized alternative religious movements, such as the Nation of Islam, the International Society of Krishna Consciousness, and the Peoples Temple, with fear or brainwashing. In examining how alternative religious movements engage racial assumptions, articulate racial discourse, or create religio-racial identities, a study of these movements illuminates the interplay between religion and culture in American history.
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American Buddhism during World War II Imprisonment
Michihiro Ama
American Buddhism during World War II imprisonment refers to the Japanese American Buddhist experience between 1942 and 1945 when persons of Japanese ancestry, commonly known as Nikkei Amerikajin, were imprisoned. A discussion of the Nikkei Buddhist experience includes the experiences of Euro-American convert Buddhists who supported them during the imprisonment period.
Immediately after the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrested and interned Japanese Buddhist priests and other leaders of Japanese communities in the United States. In March 1942, the Western Defense Command designated the three West Coast states (Washington, Oregon, and California) and Arizona as Military Area No. 1, from which all persons of Japanese descent, and alien Germans and Italians, were forcefully removed. Following Executive Order 9066 signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the US government removed approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans from the aforementioned military zone and incarcerated them in relocation centers built throughout the continental United States. During that time, the Nikkei community consisted primarily of the Issei, the first generation of Japanese immigrants, and the Nisei, their American-born children. As Tetsuden Kashima defines, the word “internment” refers to the imprisonment of enemy aliens, such as the Issei Japanese nationals, by the Department of Justice and the US Army, while the term “incarceration” refers to the confinement of the Nikkei, including a great number of the Nisei American citizens, by the War Relocation Authority. The word “imprisonment” designates the entire process consisting of internment and incarceration.
The study of American Buddhism during World War II is still in its early stages. Finding records and documents related to this subject from the large collections on Japanese American imprisonment is not an easy task. While the National Archives in Washington, DC, maintains the majority of primary sources dealing with Japanese American relocation and incarceration, other institutions, such as the Japanese American National Museum, the University of California-Los Angeles, and museums built around the sites of internment camps, also preserve records. Some of the primary sources are written in Japanese and are located in Japan, which is another stumbling block for researchers who do not read Japanese. Duncan R. Williams’s forthcoming book, American Sutra: Buddhism and the World War II Japanese American Experience, however, will change the current state of scholarship on Japanese American Buddhism during World War II.
The forceful relocation of Japanese American Buddhists served to weaken their long-standing efforts to make their ethno-religious practices accepted by America’s general public. Mass incarceration, however, forced the Japanese American Buddhists to further Americanize their religion, generated a set of new Buddhist practices, and gave them opportunities to reflect on their national identities. Buddhist faith and cultural practices associated with Japanese Buddhism contributed to ethnic solidarity, even though the Japanese American community was divided over the issue of US patriotism. During the postwar period, Japanese American Buddhists initiated a campaign to improve their image in the United States and to honor the Nisei Buddhist soldiers who fought during World War II. The formation of American Buddhism was closely connected to the development of US political ideology.
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American Evangelical Politics During the Cold War
Angela Lahr
During the decades of the Cold War, belief and power blended in ways that better integrated Protestant evangelicals into the mainstream American political culture. As the nuclear age corresponded with the early Cold War, evangelicals offered an eschatological narrative to help make sense of what appeared to many to be an increasingly dangerous world. At the same time, the post–World War II anticommunism that developed during the presidencies of Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower made room for evangelical interpretations that supported their good-versus-evil rhetoric. Evangelist Billy Graham and other evangelical leaders consistently referenced Cold War events and promoted Christian nationalism while at the same time calling on Americans to turn to God and away from sin. Evangelical missionaries, who had long interpreted the world for fellow believers in the pews back home, were agents advocating for American values abroad, but they also weighed in on American foreign policy matters in sometimes unexpected ways. By the time the Cold War world order had fully emerged in the 1950s, cold warriors were fighting the geopolitical battle for influence in part by promoting an “American way of life” that included religion, allowing evangelicals to help shape the Cold War consensus. White evangelicals were more ambivalent about supporting the civil rights movement that challenged the inclusivity of that consensus, even though civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. made the case for civil rights using moral and spiritual arguments that were familiar to evangelicalism. As the long sixties brought divisions within the country over civil rights, the war in Vietnam, and the women’s rights movement, evangelicals participated in the political discussions that captivated the country and were divided themselves. By the 1970s, conservative evangelicals helped to create the Religious Right, and a small group of liberal evangelicals began to contest it. The Religious Right would be more successful, however, in defining political evangelicalism as the culture wars extended into the 1980s. Conservative evangelicalism matured during the Reagan years and become an important part of the conservative coalition. Even as the Cold War ended, the political networks and organizations that evangelicals formed in the second half of the 20th century, both conservative and progressive, have continued to influence evangelicals’ political participation.
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American Foreign Mission Movement, c. 1870–1920s
Tracy Neal Leavelle
The American foreign mission movement at the turn of the 20th century adopted as its watchword “the evangelization of the world in this generation.” The rapid expansion of missionary boards and the enthusiasm of volunteers and supporters corresponded with European and US colonial expansion around the world. For many evangelical observers, the opening of the world seemed to offer the greatest opportunity yet to share the gospel with all. “The crisis of missions,” as one prominent author put it, required that Christians recognize the spiritual importance of this moment. Divine providence appeared to be removing obstacles to evangelization. Failure to act decisively would be a form of apostasy, an abandonment of responsibility toward God and the world.
Inspired by a revivalistic spirit, women and men joined a growing list of missionary and moral reform organizations. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions continued the work it had started in the early 19th century. New organizations like the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions and the World Student Christian Federation created networks that linked Christian evangelists and communities around the world. They published magazines, books, and pamphlets and sent inspectors, organizers, and speakers on tours of the United States and Great Britain and on grand transoceanic voyages. In 1910 the movement celebrated progress and planned for next steps at the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. Steeped in a sense of moral and racial superiority, attendees promised to transform the world.
Women found an increasingly important place in the US foreign missionary movement, especially as evangelical work diversified to include the establishment of schools and medical missions. American women labored in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere and eventually made up the majority of workers in the field. Women brought with them an ideology of domesticity that they hoped to share with their sisters abroad. Women from the US viewed local women in the missions as socially degraded and in desperate need of moral uplift. The moral authority that came with female standing in the home seemed to explain the elevated status and Christian liberty enjoyed by American women. At the same time, as more highly educated single women entered the field, the movement created space for new models of womanhood. These “New Women” lived independent lives out in the world, apart from the confines of the home.
American missionaries at the turn of the century became deeply entangled in the imperial connections of the United States and the world. While it would be a mistake to reduce their work simply to a particular strand of imperialism, it is important to understand their connections to American expansion. Missionaries took advantage of openings created by colonial activity and contributed to the spread of American cultural, political, and economic influence at a critical moment in the development of national power in the international arena.
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American Muslim Comedy
Samah Selina Choudhury
That Muslims are both consumers and practitioners of comedy may run counter to the otherwise ubiquitous notion that Islam, seemingly above all other religious traditions, is devoid of humor. Yet comedy, especially its staged performance version known as stand-up, is an occupation readily taken up by a number of Muslim comedians during the 21st century in North America. Muslim comedians are also South Asian comedians, Arab comedians, Iranian comedians, or Black comedians, among others, and the naming of their comedy explicitly as “Muslim” can be traced to how openly they speak of their common experiences of being subject to anti-Muslim hostility as a racialized act of violence. This racialization of Islam relies on “looking” Muslim: phenotypic features like dark hair, skin, and beards that simultaneously sweep up others that may share these attributes and make them targets of institutional and interpersonal violences. This common refrain can be seen especially in the material of comedians from the Allah Made Me Funny and Axis of Evil tours during the early 2000s, while later comedians like Hasan Minhaj, Aziz Ansari, and Kumail Nanjiani describe similar experiences in added terms of a racialized solidarity with other minoritized communities of color in the United States. These later comedians of the 2010s and their brand of politically oriented comedy have been upheld by dominant arts industries as examples of American multiculturalism and diversity, coinciding with the large-scale and cross-sectional social justice efforts to support undocumented immigrants, Black Lives Matter, and the #MeToo movement. Far from being a mark of their non-belonging in North American society, this racialized association with Islam is platformed as emblematic of North American societies: their exceptional openness and unparalleled freedoms. At the same time, however, women and Black Muslim comedians are rarely bestowed a similar entrée of visibility as “Muslim” comedians due to the hegemonic racialized image of Muslims as terrifying “terrorists”—a distorted privilege accessible usually only to male comedians of South Asian or Middle Eastern heritage.
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American Narratives of Sin and Salvation
W. Clark Gilpin
Sin and salvation, as an interconnected pair of ideas, imply that human life as it is ordinarily lived has been diverted from its true good or distorted from its proper form. Taken together, these paired ideas thus imply a narrative of human transformation, a redemptive process that recovers human life from erroneous ways and reorients it toward an ultimate goal or a transcendent power through which life is fulfilled. Narratives of redemption from sin have taken many forms in the course of American history, but in considering any specific example it is useful to recognize its relationship to two especially common patterns. In some cases, the redemptive narrative is organized around a decisive personal experience, and autobiographical accounts of “conversion” that describe such transformative events are common in American religious literature. In other cases, the redemptive narrative accentuates the gradual process of shaping a way of life that incorporates an individual into the ongoing social practice of a community, through spiritual disciplines ranging from meditation and prayer to acts of public witness and compassion. In either of these versions, redemptive narratives frequently hinge on the reconciling work of a transcendent power, in which salvation represents the event or process that incorporates individual persons into a society or a natural order of existence that is itself the subject of a larger, even cosmic history of redemption. In all of these variations, American narratives of redemption have interacted with broader cultural ideas of human nature and the possibilities for human psychological and societal change.
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American Protestant Foreign Missions after World War II
David C. Kirkpatrick
After the Second World War, the drama of Protestant missions featured a diversifying cast of characters. Local actors in the Global South, alongside reform-minded missionaries from the North, revised the mission script. At the level of conciliar discourse, this can be seen in perhaps two primary ways: a widened table of leadership and a widening of the Christian mission itself. An increasingly diverse Protestantism shifted the trajectory of missions toward national control and social Christian emphases. Yet, these shifts in method and theology produced strikingly divergent results for mainline Protestantism and Protestant evangelicalism. For the former, the story was largely one of global dissolution, at least institutionally. Organizations such as the World Council of Churches (b. 1948), which represented the soaring hopes of the ecumenical movement, fractured under the pressure of radical student protests, postcolonial resistance, and declining donations from disillusioned churches in the 1960s and 1970s. Seen in a different light, however, mainline Protestant mission was the victim of its own advance, both abroad on so-called mission fields and at home in the United States. In many cases, mission schools directly contributed to the growth of nationalism through their curriculum and educational methods. Backlash against missionary leadership and control often centered around these educational institutions. In the North, while the institutions of mainline Protestant mission have largely declined, their progressive values are widely assumed today within wide swaths of American life in particular—especially within universities, mainstream media, and the Democratic Party.
For Protestant evangelicalism, the mission story is largely one of global diffusion—explosive demographic growth, especially among those practicing Pentecostal forms in the Global South, and a rapid expansion of mission and relief organizations. Within a context of increasing diversity, evangelical mission agencies, rather than sidelining traditional Protestant mission approaches, constructed new forms of evangelical mission and social Christianity. This reshaping of global evangelicalism was the result of a multidirectional conversation often led by Latin Americans. Indeed, an entire generation of theologians, shaped by the global Cold War, rejected the importation of traditional mission methodologies. As Latin Americans shifted to postcolonial social Christianities, they pulled many in global evangelicalism with them. In terms of theological methodology, they synthesized the pursuit of justice with the evangelical offer of personal salvation. While the vast majority of Christians lived in Europe and North America in 1910 (the year of the epochal Edinburgh World Missionary Conference), in 2010 the vast majority of Christians lived in the Global South. Thus, at the level of conciliar discourse, the evangelical table of leadership and theology increasingly reflected its demographic center located within contexts of poverty, injustice, and widespread inequality.
Article
American Religious Empire and the Caribbean
Andrew R. McKee
America has been closely linked to the Caribbean since at least the Age of Revolutions. Across the Atlantic World, revolutions in France, Santo Domingo, and the eastern United States drastically changed interlocked understandings of citizenship, religion, and freedom. From the 19th century onward, imperial views and laws about religions developed from prerevolutionary era roots. The dominant understandings of Caribbean religious history are those of migration, diaspora, syncretism, and diversity. Studying how the American religious empire worked to regulate and control the religious practices in the Caribbean shows how the distinct religions associated with the region—Obeah, Santeria, and Vodou, for example—developed. It is impossible to study the Caribbean without centering on the processes of Anglo-European colonization and the forced migration of enslaved peoples predominantly, but not only, from Africa. Labor and economic concerns underline nearly every Caribbean religious culture that exploded in the region from the colonial period onward.
Article
Amoghavajra
Geoffrey Goble
Amoghavajra (Bukongjin’gang不空金剛; 704/5-774) was a historically significant Buddhist monk who operated in China during the Tang dynasty (618–907). He was a prolific translator and is widely regarded as the founder of an Esoteric or Tantric Buddhist tradition in East Asia. Arriving in China at a young age, Amoghavajra became a monk and practiced under Vajrabodhi (Jin’gangzhi金剛智; 671–741). Following his master’s death, Amoghavajra undertook an ocean voyage to Sri Lanka and southern India. He returned to Tang China in 746/747 with a collection of newly acquired Buddhist texts and training in ritual practices. He was the recipient of patronage and support from members of the ruling elite in Tang China, including a succession of three emperors—Xuanzong 玄宗 (r. 713–756), Suzong 肅宗 (r. 756–762), and Daizong 代宗 (r. 762–779). Amoghavajra served the Tang government with his ritual services and was appointed a minister in the central government bureau charged with overseeing official ritual services for the Tang state. With this support and influence, Amoghavajra translated a vast collection of Buddhist scriptures and authored numerous commentaries, ritual manuals, and compendia, and he effectively established a teaching of Buddhism in China that is generally referred to as “Esoteric Buddhism.” This teaching of Buddhism was subsequently transmitted by Kūkai 空海 (774–835) to Japan, where it became established as the Japanese Shingon school. In Chinese and Japanese Buddhist histories, Amoghavajra is regarded as a patriarch of Tang dynasty Esoteric Buddhism and Japanese Shingon.
