This dissertation will argue that, rather than simply reflecting the religious worldviews of his creators and readers, the presentations of Superman that span more than 75 years in a variety of mass media, have produced a mythology, iconography, ethical code, and set of practices that reflects a dynamic relationship with the complex religious systems in the United States. Obviously, the presentation of Superman by his creators and the reception of Superman by his readers are heavily influenced by Christianity, Judaism, and American civil religion (he does, after all, represent “truth, justice, and the American way”) along with many other religious worldviews. It explores the dynamic and complex interactions between Superman and his fans and show that the figure of Superman is utilized by his fans to understand theological and ethical issues, while, at the same time, their understanding of Superman shapes those theological and ethical opinions and ideas. American religious traditions influence the popular images and representations of Superman, but Superman also influences the understanding religious traditions across a breadth of historical and cultural contexts. Superman’s state of multiple expressions of permanent liminality allows the character and his stories to be useful sites for people to perform the religious work of constructing, strengthening, and/or negotiating boundaries between categories, such as the human and the divine or the secular and the religious. It is through these boundaries that people define and interpret their religious worldviews.

This project examines recent fiction by ex-Mormon authors and highlights how these novels reinforce an American ideal of “good religion.” These texts reveal the boundaries of American religious freedom by illustrating examples of “bad religion” and providing favorable alternatives. The paper looks at scholarship on 19th century anti-Mormon literature, which provides a foundation for the more modern literature at hand. Through the recent narratives, authors point to an abstract concept of benign, acceptable religion, marking as harmful that which does not share these key characteristics. While these fictional sects appear differently in each work, they comment on similar themes, such as the threat of rigid authority structures and figures, community isolation and insulation, coercive proselytizing and manipulation, and an emphasis on escaping the sect. These themes highlight the existence of a particular brand of American “good religion,” which is antithetical to such groups illustrated in these texts.

This project continues the tradition of scholarly attention to the social service activities of African-American religious organizations. Analysis of data from the 1998 National Congregations Study reveals that African-American congregations are not more or less likely to support social services in general. They are, however, more likely to support certain types of programs. Specifically, these are programs in the areas of substance abuse, mentoring/tutoring, and non-religious education. Further analysis of NCS indicates that, among African-American congregations, theological conservatism is associated with a greater likelihood of supporting social service programs. This runs counter to existing assumptions about theological conservatism, which has previously been associated with a focus on "other-worldly" concerns, such as getting into heaven. As such, theological conservatism has never been thought to encourage concern over "this-worldly" issues such as poverty, homelessness, and other social problems that are part of the social service realm. While these assumptions about theological conservatism hold true for non-African-American congregations, the same cannot be said for African-American congregations. This project attempts to figure out why this is the case. Does theological conservatism mean something different in African-American congregations than what it does in other congregations? If so, what are these different meanings?To answer these questions, the project includes nineteen interviews with key informants, such as ministers, priests, or other staff people/leaders, from local religious congregations in a mid-sized city in the southwestern U.S. Nine of the informants are affiliated with African-American congregations, and the other ten are affiliated with non-African-American congregations. The interviews establish the racial/ethnic composition, theological & political orientations (liberal, conservative, or in the middle) of each informant's congregation, as well as whether the congregation supports any social service programs. The interview data show the ways in which many of the stereotypes about theological conservatism do not apply to African-American, theologically conservative congregations. Many of the interviewees from African-American, theologically conservative congregations emphasize the importance of relationships and community in ways that the non-African-American theological conservatives do not. This explains why these African-American congregations are more likely to support social service programs, unlike other theologically conservative congregations.

The religious book club provides a fascinating location for observing the social construction of reality. This study sets out to discover how religious identities affected reading and how reading affected religious identity through examining social reading. Seven book groups, all in the Boston area, participated. Three groups were affiliated with a church or synagogue, three had no religious affiliation, and the seventh was transitioning away from a religious affiliation. Fieldwork within the groups and individual interviews are analyzed using grounded theory techniques. All readers used reading to pursue aims such as relationships, educational status, and transformations of identity, but only readers within the religiously affiliated groups experienced an "inflection" of those aims. While readers in nonreligious book groups developed friendships, the religious book group members developed a sense of congregational identity. Nonreligious group readers sought to be "well read" religious group members sought to be articulate believers. Many readers sought to transform themselves through books, but religious groups transformed their members through emphasizing boundaries and identities, constructing shared definitions of "religion." Nonreligious group members were unconcerned with tying book club identity to personal identity. Religious groups, through confirming and challenging definitions of religion, developed religious identities that were expected to have deeper relevance to individual lives. Individual religious identity did not inflect the aims of reading, since religious individuals in nonreligious groups did not develop their sense of belonging, status, or identity around religious constructions. Within religious groups, it was not religious doctrines, ethics, or awe that produced the religious inflection of reading's aims. Only the affiliation with a formal religious institution was necessary. This demonstrates that religion functions not as a foundational worldview for its adherents, but as a thin container that offers the opportunity to develop a deeper, more durable identity. Despite reading's construction as a primarily individual activity, these findings also demonstrate how the social infrastructure of reading can have important effects.

Thesis advisor: R. Shep Melnick / Many political thinkers have suggested that religion is a necessary prerequisite for the proper functioning of American democracy. Foremost among them is Alexis de Tocqueville who argues, in particular, that religion serves as a counterbalance to individualism and crass acquisitiveness—two of the most worrisome aspects of American democracy. Yet, Tocqueville’s own analysis bids us to ask whether religion still serves this beneficial purpose nearly 200 years later, or whether democratization and individualism have not remade religion itself. The primary theme of the dissertation is therefore to investigate whether democratization and individualism have wrought changes of real significance in American religion and religious institutions. In the first part, I argue against the secularization thesis on the grounds that contemporary developments in American religion, such as the so-called rise of the “nones” and the growing distrust of organized religion, are explicable not by secularization but by democratization and individualism. To understand this phenomenon better, I return to the French liberal tradition of Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tocqueville to articulate a theory of democratic deformalization—a process whereby American democracy breaks down the “formal” elements of religion. In the second part, I argue that individualism has caused a host of quantitative changes in American religion, including declining church membership, dwindling church participation, and a collapse in the perceived importance of organized religion itself. There are notable qualitative changes as well, including increasingly tenuous connections to churches, a proliferation of religious options within churches, and a new megachurch model that is better able to cater to individual taste and preference. In the third and most substantial part, I take up the question of whether individualism itself has changed or evolved over time, in predictable or unpredictable ways. Here, I argue that there has been a general shift from utilitarian individualism towards expressive individualism, with profound consequences for religious institutions and for society itself. The former, with its connection to the Protestant work ethic and Puritan social philosophy tends to cause an inclination in individuals to partake in community, submit to institutions, and follow moral and religious rules; the latter, with its belief in authenticity, causes a profound disdain for communal sources of authority, social institutions, and moral constraints. I conclude by arguing that the anthropology of expressive individualism, and its historical growth since the 1960s, proves to be the fundamental cause behind all these changes. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science.

Martyrdom and American Gay History: Secular Advocacy, Christian Ideas, and Gay Assimilation" is an analysis of gay martyr discourses from the 1970s through 2014. In particular, the dissertation examines the archives, narrative representations, memorials, and media depictions of Harvey Milk, Matthew Shepard, Tyler Clementi, and AIDS. The project's primary focus is to investigate the role of religious rhetoric in facilitating American gay assimilation. Discourses of gay martyrdom reveal that secular gay advocates habitually employed Protestant Christian ideas in order to present gay Americans as similar to the dominant culture of straight Christians, a strategy that became increasingly prevalent by the end of the twentieth century after gays were blamed for spreading a national plague through sexual licentiousness. In turn, discourses of gay martyrdom expose the recurrence of Christian ideas in promoting, while concurrently foreclosing, the parameters of gay social inclusion. "Martyrdom and American Gay History" also questions the politics of martyrdom and analyzes why some deaths have been mourned as national tragedies. Milk, Shepard, and Clementi, the three most commonly-invoked gay martyrs, represent a narrow fraction of gay Americans that only includes white, middle-class, gay men. The dissertation demonstrates that discourses of gay martyrdom have promoted assimilation, not diverse sexual freedoms or capacious possibilities for queer lives. Ultimately, Protestant Christian dominance in the United States has been obfuscated whenever Christianity has been depicted primarily as an antigay monolith. Discourses of gay martyrdom reveal the role of Protestant Christian dominance in secular gay advocacy, and the ways in which Christian ideas have shaped and foreclosed possibilities for acceptable gay American citizens. / Religion

This thesis is about how Moravian women in the community of Salem, North Carolina, challenged the policies of the church in order to gain more autonomy in the late 18th century. Settling into the Piedmont, these women encountered excessive materialism and a widely accepted racial hierarchy, which challenged the simple life of the Moravian community. I argue that although historians of Moravians have explored the dissent in the Salem community, they have not considered the desires of Moravian women and how their environment shaped them. Moravian Elders struggled to keep their congregation in line and were greatly concerned with the conduct of women. Young women running away with outsider men reflected poorly on their patriarchal control. Married women who conducted their households in a way that contradicted the guidance of the Elders, seemed to threaten the future of their community by corrupting the youth. Despite the efforts of the Elders to contain dissent, they were sometimes pushed to adjust their policies. Using the disciplinary records of the Elders, memoirs, the Single Sisters Diary, and various documents from the congregation, I examine the experiences and actions of Moravian women prior to their arrival in Salem and shortly after, the dissent and desires of Single Sisters, and how Married Sisters navigated the rules of the Brethren to run their own households. Despite the attempts of the Elders to curb disobedient behavior, many women were successful. Moreover, the disobedience of Moravian women exemplifies how women were involved in changing the Moravian church and the development of the Piedmont culture by challenging the policies of the church and seeking opportunities for freedom. / Master of Arts / In the second half of the eighteenth century, a group of German Lutheran reformers or Pietists, called the Moravians, started a congregation and community in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. Largely surrounded by small communities that were embracing materialism and benefiting from enslaved labor, Moravian Elders struggled to keep their congregation in line. This thesis examines how single and married Moravian women disobeyed the policies of the community in order to gain control over their marriages, work, and homes. These women navigated the spaces around them, southern racial hierarchy, and opportunities for dissent to garner some control over their lives and push back against the rules of the Elders. In this thesis, I argue that white Moravian women used private and public spaces to bend or break the rules of the Elders and gain new freedoms and autonomy. Furthermore, Moravian women had to consider their identities as white Moravian women in a slave owning society, which implied that they were superior to enslaved Black individuals. Due to these influences, Moravian women were inspired to dissent and challenge the Elders, which in turn inspired changes in the policies of the Moravian church.

This project investigates the development of Western Man's relationship with nature by comparing and contrasting it with the relationship that Native Cultures, particularly Native American Cultures have with nature. This reveals Western Man's reliance on the concept of objectivity and the resultant objectification of the natural world. In so doing Western Man has put himself apart from the rest of the world, somehow above it. Although I do not argue that this is wholly unjust, I do argue that it has resulted in a loss of an essential component of the human experience. Creative Participation is identified as a way to bring together some of the lessons of the Native communities with the existing knowledge of Western Society. This knowledge is then applied to the practical problem of Mine Land Reclamation in Southern West Virginia. Creative Participation, at its heart, is a way to reconnect man with the reality of his connection to the rest of the world, rather than his separation and control of it. / Master of Landscape Architecture

This thesis considers the experiences that motivated the creation of an 1863 painting by American artist Eastman Johnson entitled The Lord is My Shepherd. An examination of the painting—which depicts a black man reading a Bible—reveals multiple artistic, social, political, and spiritual influences. Created in the midst of the American Civil War, the painting's inspiration derived from Johnson's New England childhood, training in Europe, encounters with the Transcendentalist movement, and his abolitionist views. As a result, The Lord is My Shepherd is a culminating work in Johnson's oeuvre that was prompted by years of experience and observations in an age of rampant racism and civil war. It is also argued that The Lord is My Shepherd has diaristic qualities in that Johnson explored significant social and political issues of the day such as slavery through his work. Before now, this painting has been considered a relatively minor work within Johnson's oeuvre. This thesis seeks to change that perception and raise awareness of the contextual significance of The Lord is My Shepherd.

In light of claims that liberalism has led to a breakdown in society, this paper refutes these claims by examining how workplace spirituality at Starbucks Coffee impacts the identities of several employees. While others have examined workplace spirituality as a management technique, this study illustrates how it could be understood as a distinctly modern way of being religious. By linking the ethnography to recent religious trends, this study illustrates how employees are cultivating a spirituality of an inner self. Specifically, these employees accomplish three things. First, they claim to discover their true authentic self. Also, despite the alienation of modern life, workplace spirituality helps employees establish new forms of community. Third, they rework traditional notions of authority in the workplace in ways that strengthen a connection with their inner selves. Finally, the author briefly explores the broader ethical and religious implications that arise from understanding the dynamics of workplace spirituality.