This thesis is about nineteenth-century American Methodist circuit riders. They wrote autobiographies in order to define the denomination in response to changes it underwent during the first half of the nineteenth century. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Religion in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Spring Semester, 2013. / March 27, 2013. / Autobiography, Memory, Methodist / Includes bibliographical references. / John Corrigan, Professor Directing Thesis; Amanda Porterfield, Committee Member; Martin Kavka, Committee Member.

Muslims in the West African state of Mali use the concept of baraji--which translates from the vernacular as "divine reward" or "recompense"--as a framework for understanding proper religious practice and the role of Islam in daily matters. In order to understand the various ways through which Muslims in West Africa seek measurable units of baraji, this work presents the life history of Amadou Diallo, an elderly Fula man and former cattle herder living in the town of Ouélessébougou in southwestern Mali. Drawing from ethnographic research, I show how Muslims in West Africa use baraji to find religious relevance in everyday and ritual life by exploring the practices, experiences, and feelings that have driven Amadou's lifelong aim to acquire the unspecified amount of baraji that God requires for a person to gain salvation and admission into paradise. Amadou's personal narrative unfolds the lived experience of Islam in everyday life in West Africa by revealing the intricate ways that Muslims search out baraji. I explore baraji as a form of value through which West African Muslims discern the different religious practices and daily choices that they employ during their lifetime while highlighting how the acquisition of baraji changes with age and circumstance, revealing Islam as dynamically embedded in the life cycle. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Religion in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2013. / March 1, 2013. / Baraji, Islam, Life History, Mali, West Africa / Includes bibliographical references. / Joseph Hellweg, Professor Directing Dissertation; Michael Uzendoski, University Representative; Adam Gaiser, Committee Member; Peter Garretson, Committee Member.

Much of the current historiography of American Christian fundamentalism focuses solely on Scottish Common Sense Realism as an intellectual source of fundamentalist epistemology since the early twentieth century. This thesis argues against this historiographical trend by illuminating the central role of Dutch Reformed presuppositionalism in the formation of fundamentalist epistemologies. Articulated within the context of revitalization, confessional, and secessionists movements within the state Dutch Reformed Church, theologians such as Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck developed an epistemological system that stressed the necessity of correct presuppositions as a prerequisite for obtaining truth. Without correct ideas about God, in other words, one was incapable of perceiving any other truth in its fullness. This epistemological tradition was brought to North America by Dutch Reformed immigrants, who primarily settled in the Upper Midwest during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cornelius Van Til, one of these immigrants, served as a professor at J. Gresham Machen's Westminster Theological Seminary immediately following the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy and taught his unswerving presuppositionalism to several generations of non-Dutch, American Presbyterian seminarians, including Francis A. Schaeffer. Schaeffer, though rejecting the strictly Reformed strain of fundamentalism represented by Machen and Van Til's Orthodox Presbyterian Church, adapted presuppositionalism to suit his purposes, combining it with traditional Princetonian Scottish Common Sense Realism. This resulted in an epistemology that proved to be influential during the rise of the Christian Right in the latter half of the twentieth century. By investigating epistemologies that competed with Scottish Common Sense Realism or creatively interacted with it, a clearer picture appears of the diverse nature of Christian fundamentalism. It no longer seems to be monolithic, but rather it contains a plethora of theological and confessional influences that interact in numerous ways that necessitate academic investigation. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Religion in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Spring Semester, 2013. / March 27, 2013. / Cornelius Van Til, Francis Schaeffer, Fundamentalism, Presuppositionalism, Reformed theology / Includes bibliographical references. / John Corrigan, Professor Directing Thesis; Amanda Porterfield, Committee Member; John Kelsay, Committee Member.

This dissertation examines the decade-long (1972-1982) Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) battle in Florida. It reviews the role that religion played in the political conflict. Religion had a motivating effect on ERA proponents and opponents. Women were mobilized to enter the political arena, many for the first time, on both sides of the ERA battle. Religion affected the legislative debates and public rhetoric, and had a strong role in galvanizing support and opposition. Moving beyond the description of religion in the historical narrative, this dissertation also describes how pro- and anti-ERA forces transmitted beliefs, communicated ideology, and constructed meaning through portraying, or "framing" events for public consumption. The "frames" used by each side of the debate demonstrate how moral worldviews transformed into political positions. Primary and secondary historical sources are used to trace the affect of religion on political semantics - especially the framing of legislative debate arguments, anecdotes, and rhetoric. Archival research includes information from legislative committee meetings, floor debates, correspondence, newspaper articles, and oral histories. In addition, this dissertation emphasizes the religious connection made by ERA opponents to other social concerns and how religious rhetoric obscured economic concerns that had been paramount to the conception and congressional support for the ERA. As the decade unfolded, ERA opposition fueled the rise of the Religious Right. Ratification was unsuccessful in Florida for the same reasons the ERA failed in other states. The white male-dominated southern legislature favored opponents' explicit moral framing while also implicitly following the wishes of business interests. A handful of senate powerbrokers blocked passage of the amendment for a decade, based on varying reasons, although the rhetoric followed similar religious arguments throughout the ten-year battle. The decade-long debates reveal the perpetual conflict in the political realm when religion, gender, and social issues intersect. This project attempts to make a contribution in three ways: first, by expanding the current ERA studies to include a slice of political life - the ERA battle - in the state of Florida, with its unique political demographics; second, by explaining how religion led to the failure of ratification when opponents linked the amendment to "threatening" social issues such as abortion expansion or gay rights, and forced ERA supporters into a defensive strategy; and third, by showing how Florida women used political framing in their lobbying efforts to generate support, or opposition, or resources, in the decade-long political conflict. Ironically, although the ERA was defeated, female proponents and opponents were empowered through political involvement. This was especially paradoxical for ERA opponents, who advocated traditional female roles while immersed in political activism outside the home. After the ERA battle ended in 1982, many women's issues were addressed through progressive legislation, court decisions, and administrative rulings. More female legislators were elected to political office on the state and national government levels. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Religion in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester, 2013. / June 24, 2013. / Equal Rights Amendment, Florida Legislature, Florida Politics, Framing, Religion / Includes bibliographical references. / Amanda Porterfield, Professor Directing Dissertation; John Corrigan, Committee Member; John Kelsay, Committee Member.

'The Gospel According to the Klan' identifies the intimate relationships between Protestantism, nationalism, gender and whiteness in the print culture of the 1920s Klan in order to demonstrate that the Klan reflected the values, ideals and aspirations of white America in that era. To present the commonalities between the Klan and the 'mainstream' deflates historiographical arguments that label the Klan as periphery in both narratives of American culture and American religious history. This also suggests the ways in which religious faith, nationalism, gender and race all define and create one another in the Klan's attempts to define what America was and what she certainly was not. The chapters, then, focus not on chronology but themes in an attempt to recraft the worldview of the 1920s Klan. I rely on methodologies of lived religion and ethnography to crack open their world and recreate it for readers in order to move beyond the Klan classification as a simply white supremacist group and show the complexities of the order's hatred and commitment to the American nation. Klan print culture has been under-utilized in histories of the Klan, and it is a rich resource to see the logic, values and theologies of the order. What also becomes clear is that the Klan consciously defined the order in opposition to Catholicism. Catholic voices are equally important as Klan voices in the telling of this narrative because they illuminated another vision of America, which the Klan sought to counteract. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Religion in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Fall Semester, 2008. / July 17, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references. / John Corrigan, Professor Directing Dissertation; Neil Jumonville, Outside Committee Member; Amanda Porterfield, Committee Member; Amy Koehlinger, Committee Member; Robin Simon, Committee Member.

Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) is the largest Christian broadcasting entity in the world. Through its programming and global satellite outreach, TBN has grown and nurtured the pentecostal Faith movement. Affirming the divine right to wealth and health, the magical power of words, and the complete autonomy of its followers, the Faith movement is one of the fastest-growing religions in twenty-first century America. With roots in American popular religion going back to the eighteenth century, and with pentecostalism's founding in the early twentieth, independent Faith ministries today operate scores of immense megachurches in every part of the United States, and throughout the world. As the media arm and clearinghouse for the Faith movement, TBN integrates technology into its religious message and serves as a kind of 'electronic church' for the Faith faithful. In addition to the Faith message of prosperity, the Faith movement today is among the most racially integrated religions in the country, thanks to ongoing high-profile efforts to promote the creation and maintenance of multiracial congregations. Additionally, TBN advances its global political agenda in support of Israel, and against Muslims and Islam, through subtly encoded messages broadcast on its domestic and international television stations. Through primary source research and interviews with Faith leaders and practitioners, the Faith movement can be understood as a religion espousing a version of the 'American Dream' that promises wealth, health, abundance, and racial reconciliation to ambitious hard-working people of every race. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Religion in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester, 2011. / June 30, 2011. / Includes bibliographical references. / John Corrigan, Professor Directing Dissertation; Maxine Jones, University Representative; Amy Koehlinger, Committee Member; Amanda Porterfield, Committee Member.

The challenge posed by Wong Yung Quy, a Chinese immigrant living in San Francisco in the 1870s, to a law regulating the exhumation of human remains on the basis of religious freedom reveals the subordination of religious practice to public health concerns and regulation in nineteenth century California. This thesis examines the relationship between religion and public health in nineteenth century California through an analysis of the religio-racial climatology of the State Board of Health of California as well as the court's privileging of public health in Wong Yung Quy's challenge to California's law regulating the exhumation of human remains (In Re Wong Yung Quy, 1880). The intersection of religion, law, and public health in this context reveals the bio-political authority held by public health authorities, and the means by which a vision of the United States as a Christian society was normalized and enforced.The challenge posed by Wong Yung Quy, a Chinese immigrant living in San Francisco in the 1870s, to a law regulating the exhumation of human remains on the basis of religious freedom reveals the subordination of religious practice to public health concerns and regulation in nineteenth century California. This thesis examines the relationship between religion and public health in nineteenth century California through an analysis of the religio-racial climatology of the State Board of Health of California as well as the court's privileging of public health in Wong Yung Quy's challenge to California's law regulating the exhumation of human remains (In Re Wong Yung Quy, 1880). The intersection of religion, law, and public health in this context reveals the bio-political authority held by public health officials, and the means by which a vision of the United States as a Christian society was normalized and enforced. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Religion in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Spring Semester, 2013. / March 28, 2013. / chinese, public health, religion / Includes bibliographical references. / Amanda Porterfield, Professor Directing Thesis; John Corrigan, Committee Member; Joseph Hellweg, Committee Member.

My thesis is a profile of the Tibetan Buddhist protector deity Rāhula (Tib: Khyab 'jug chen po), particularly the ritual/magic and mythic complex that surrounds the cult of this deity. However, I will be using Rāhula as a case study to make a larger theoretical point. Namely, I will argue that the cult of Rāhula, as it developed in Tibet, was part of a broader Buddhist campaign to demonize the landscape of Tibet for missionizing and political purposes, in what we might call the mandalization of Tibet. While this took place in Tibet approximately from the twelfth century through the seventeenth, I will further argue that Buddhism, since its inception and as it developed in India, rested firmly on the foundation of a cosmology teeming with spirits (or daimons, to use a Greek umbrella term for a host of different kinds of beings). That is to say, conceptions of daimons like Rāhula have historically been intimately connected with Buddhist doctrine and philosophy. As such, I will critique both the borrowing model and (to a lesser extent) the substratum model which both suggest that daimon cults are somehow an amalgamation or epiphenomenon in Buddhism. I am particularly interested in using Rāhula as a case study because he represents a peculiar case of Tibetan elaboration upon an Indian antecedent. Rāhula, or Rāhu in Indian conceptions, has been a more or less abstract cosmological force that is synonymous with malignancy. While all the other planets (Skt. graha, Tib. gza') are deemed to be gods, Rāhula alone is an asura (demon or titan), in fact the only asura to have tasted the elixir of immortality. Thus he is regarded as a particularly fierce enemy of the gods. By the early second millennium in Tibet, Rāhula has become a high-level Buddhist dharma protector (specifically of the Dzokchen (Rdzogs chen) tradition of Nyingma (Rnying ma) philosophy) and an emanation of the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī (or often, Vajrapāṇi). He has historically been heavily associated with destructive rites or war magic, and weather-making magic. There are a number of specific questions concerning this particular deity that I intend to answer in my thesis, in particular: How do the mythology and astrological functions of Rāhula in Tibet relate to Indian antecedents? Why might Buddhists have transformed a relatively minor figure in Hindu mythology in such a significant way? Who were some of the Tibetan figures involved in valorizing this deity? What larger social and political climate in Tibet might have contributed to this transformation? How might Rāhula's mythology relate to Buddhist philosophy, specifically Dzokchen thought? / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Religion in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Religion. / Spring Semester, 2012. / April 2, 2012. / Buddhism, Deities, India, Protectors, Tibet / Includes bibliographical references. / Bryan Cuevas, Professor Directing Thesis; Jimmy Yu, Committee Member; Kathleen Erndl, Committee Member.

This dissertation is an examination of how American religious historians have described Protestant support for American war from 1702 through 1992. It is a historiography that contributes to the lack of recent American religious historiographies that consider church histories written prior to Sydney Ahlstrom's 1972 text. In addressing this shortfall of scholarly attention to pre-1970s church histories, this work examines what each historian wrote about war in order to trace historical trends. Starting in 1930 here is a clear shift away from the uncritical triumphal language that justified warfare as a corollary to American expansion and exceptionalism. William Warren Sweet's 1930 The Story of Religions in America is central to the more critical historical narratives within the field of American religious history. Therefore, this work indicates that those who view the histories written between Robert Baird and Sydney Ahlstrom as a monolithic group fail to recognize the shift toward critiquing Protestant support for war starting in 1930. The historians within the first chapter of this dissertation (Robert Baird, Leonard Bacon, Leonard W. Bacon, and Peter Mode) wrote unabashedly universal validation for Protestant support of war, especially wars against Native Indians. Therefore, when William W. Sweet was critical about Protestant support for war and wrote little concerning wars against Indians, he broke decisively with those Christian historians who came before him. These narrative trends indicated he was part of a new cultural and political paradigm. The new worldview called into question liberal Protestantism's ability to resist American nationalism and isolationism. Protestant liberal nationalism made it impossible for many Protestants to resist enthusiastically supporting the Spanish-American War and WWI while isolationism made it impossible for many Protestants to confront fascism in Germany even as late as 1939. While critiques of liberal Protestant theology did not appear in Sweet's work, he did provide the first significant critique of Protestant support for war. Chapter two investigates the theological developments in America during the 1920s and 1930s that William Sweet's was aware of when writing his initial critique (1930) and his updated critique (1939) of Protestant support for the Civil War, the Spanish-American War and the WWI. Sweet had knowledge of the writings of the Methodist liberals at Boston University, European neo-orthodoxy, and the Christian Century writings of Reinhold Niebuhr. Particularly influential on Sweet's concept of theology were three critiques of Karl Barth written in America in 1928 by Albert Knudson, Wilhelm Pauck and Reinhold Niebuhr. These three reviews of Barth influenced the language of Sweet in his 1939 review of theological developments in the 1920s and 1930s. Chapter three traces how Sweet's history was the first to criticize both Northern and Southern Protestant clergy during the Civil War. In addition he denounced the Protestant clergy during WWI for their turning their churches into government agencies that promoted the war. Sweet's critical narrative stemmed from and highlighted a crisis within liberal Protestantism. This crisis was magnified by the vast majority of Social Gospel liberals abandoning their pacifistic ideals to support a war that they truly believed would free the world from future war. Once the war was over, Protestants in large measure retreated to an idealist pacifist and a politically isolationist position that refused to resist the rise of fascist Nazism even after Hitler invaded Poland. To fundamentalist and Neo-orthodox Protestants these events clearly demonstrated the naïve way too many Social Gospel liberals approached war and their failure to understand the destructive power of social evil. The theological critique of liberalism that was spreading throughout American academic universities during the 1920s and 1930s provided a compelling and productive way to track the trends within the narrative accounts of American religious history. Chapter four evaluates how Clifton E. Olmstead's 1960 work made significant strides in overcoming the lack of discussion of Native Indian wars within Sweet's work. Olmstead described Protestant settlers at war against Indians, analyzed why the wars occurred, and provided a critique of Protestant support for those wars. Olmstead discussed how the settlers perceived the Indians as ignorant, shiftless, and depraved savages and pointed to these attitudes as reasons for lack of success in missions and in leading to hostilities. Earlier accounts justified settlers' attitudes toward the Native tribes but Olmstead questioned them in an attempt to critique them. He also provided the most significant analysis of neo-orthodoxy and the Niebuhr bothers' influence on American theology from the Great Depression through 1960. Olmstead's work set the stage for two historians in the fifth chapter, Martin Marty and Sydney Ahlstrom. They both wrote longer and more detailed criticism of Protestant support for war against Native Indians that led to genocide-like practices against Indians especially during Western expansion. The other historians in chapter four were Winthrop Hudson and Edwin Gaustad both of whom wrote relatively little concerning Protestant support for war. Chapter five also explored how historians Catherine Albanese and Mark Noll described Protestant support for war and how their interest in describing war paralleled their interest in writing about neo-orthodox theologies in America form the 1930s through the 1960s. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Religion in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Summer Semester, 2012. / April 18, 2012. / Church historian, Historiography, liberalism, Neo-orthodoxy, Protestant, war / Includes bibliographical references. / Amanda Porterfield, Professor Directing Dissertation; Neil Jumonville, University Representative; John Kelsay, Committee Member.

The Tulasī plant (Ocimum sanctum) is viewed within the purview of Hinduism as a form of the goddess Lakṣmī, or a consort of the god Viṣṇu. This designation seems to originate within the corpus of Purāṇic texts composed in the Sanskrit language from approximately the 5th to 15th centuries CE. The sanctity of the plant, and other forms of vegetation, resembles even earlier cults of Yakṣa and Yakṣī, or nature spirit, worship. The adoration of the plant continues into modernity in various ways. This paper examines the Tulasī plant through the various myths describing her sanctity, as well as how these myths are interpreted by modern devotees of the plant. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Religion in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Spring Semester, 2008. / April 7, 2008. / Hinduism, Vaisnavism, Tulasi, Vrnda, Puranas, Krishna / Includes bibliographical references. / Kathleen M. Erndl, Professor Directing Thesis; Bryan Cuevas, Committee Member; Adam Gaiser, Committee Member.