Research

My research focuses on questions about collective identity and social action. I am especially interested in how overlapping racial, religious, and national identities contribute to how members of religious groups collectively understand who they are, where they come from, and what they should be doing in the world.

This work has taken shape in the context of two long term research projects:

Black Visions of the Holy Land: African American Christian engagement with israel and palestine

columbia university press, 2024

Since at least the high point of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, African American Christianity has been widely recognized as a potent force for social change, with the most attention to the political significance of Black churches focusing on domestic protest and electoral politics. Black Visions of the Holy Land widens the lens through which we understand the political significance of “the Black Church.” It looks to African American Christian engagement with the global issue of Israel and Palestine to show how Black church politics transcend domestic arenas and enter global spaces. It asks, why African American Christians would get involved—and even take sides—in Palestine and Israel when they typically focus their attention on local and domestic issues?

Black Visions of the Holy Land uses four case studies of African American Christian involvement in Israel and Palestine to argue that the meaning of the ostensibly singular and unifying category of “the Black Church” is actually deeply contested in the world of Black religious politics. These cases—ranging from African American Christian Zionists to Palestinian solidarity activists—demonstrate a wide range of responses to Palestine and Israel in religious and political terms. They also show how the history, identity, culture, and mission of “the Black Church” is contested at every turn. The book opens up new approaches to questions about what Black churches are, how they understand their political role and social significance, how race, religion, and politics converge in both competing and complementary ways, and how the meaning of overlapping racial and religious identities shift when the context shifts from national to global spaces.

American Evangelicals, Islam & The Competition for Religious Authority

I am also working on a new project that analyzes how American evangelical Christians think about and relate to Muslims and Islam. Given their prominent status as a religious group and political force, evangelicals feature prominently in public discourse in the United States about the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion in the democratic public sphere. Since September 11, 2001, the work of drawing these boundaries among evangelicals has increasingly focused on Muslims and Islam as ostensible religious, political, and racial outsiders. The resulting dominant evangelical discourse on Islam is one that casts Muslims as dangerous and threatening outsiders to American civil life in intersecting theological, racial, and national terms. 

This project analyzes American evangelical struggles over the authority to define Islam and Muslims, with attention to the role of evangelical leaders and institutions within the pluralistic American public sphere. Through a mixed methods analysis of more than 200 evangelical books on Islam and three comparative case studies, it investigates the competition among evangelicals leaders for authoritative “ethnographic capital” to prescribe orthodox understandings of Islam as a religion and Muslims as religious, political, and racial “others.” Through this analysis, the project explores the role of evangelical leaders and institutions in shaping the boundaries of democratic participation in the American public sphere.

Research Support

My research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, the Louisville Institute, the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, the Institution for Social and Policy Studies, the Social Science Research Council, and the Anthony and Mae Depree Luidens ('12) Fund at Hope College.