This is an annual event that celebrates Temple University's Department of Religion, our alumni, our current graduate students, former students and our faculty. Friends of the program are all welcome!
The use of scripture and the appeal to its authority is not new in American political life, but in recent election cycles it has emerged in new ways on all sides of the political spectrum. This panel will explore how nominally secular political movements and events in the United States are shaped by the use of scriptural texts. Drawing together scholars of various religious traditions who will each offer short reflections on individual moments of scriptural citation in US politics, this panel will interrogate the relationship between scripture and politics in our present moment. We anticipate that an interrogation of this phenomenon will allow us to understand something important about the power of religious language in modern politics; and the roles of faith, community, and memory as discursive ideals or instruments of moral suasion in political speech.
“When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice. The Bible tells us, ‘How good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity.’" This line from former President Donald Trump’s inauguration speech makes clear reference to Psalm 133:1, but to what end? This paper will examine the use of this scripture citation and demonstrate how it is being engaged through the lens of Christian nationalism, an ideology that influced both the 2015 Presidential campaign and the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capital. Further, it will be argued that such modes of scriptural engagement in public political discourse subtly shape the expression of civil religion and nationalist discourse so as to equate "American identity" exclusively with a particular form of white evangelical Christianity that rejects, for example, the possibility of Muslims identifying as Americans.
This paper will explore President Joe Biden’s use of The Quran during the annual Eid al-Fitr dinners that hosts Muslim civic leaders, thinkers, and activists at The White House. By quoting from verses 49:13 and 30:22, Biden aims to promote and sanctify American values of equality and diversity, feeding Muslim American appetites for inclusion and belonging in a post-Trump presidency.
In this panel participation, Shonda Nicole Gladden, an AME Elder, Womanist, and Americanist by training, explores Stacy Abrams’ paraphrase of Isaiah 40:31 in “All In: The Fight for Democracy,” a 2020 documentary film on voter suppression in the United States.
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Freedom and beauty can be understood as universal desires, and at the same time, are often constrained by the limits of our temporal reality. What it means to be free or to live in beauty is often grounded in our earthly experience, and from any perceived lack in our experience, our desire simultaneously reaches for more—for that which transcends our material reality. Perhaps this is best articulated in Saidiyah Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments as that “indiscernible otherwise,” the desires beyond-yet-within the constraints of material experience. This paper will analyze Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives to explore transcendence as a practice in the lives of black women. Towards this task, this paper engages Platonist thinkers given the resonances with Platonist thought with themes found within Hartman’s text. The juxtaposition in placing Hartman’s text in conversation with Platonist dialogue reveals how distinctive particularities and divergences can expand our traditional conceptions.
This paper proposes that it is aesthetics that constitutes the "chaos" of white Christian nationalist political movements for the scholars who study them. In their description and evaluation of resurgent white Christian nationalism in the U.S., scholars tend either to ignore its aesthetics or immediately turn to ethics to distinguish it from other movements. I offer Philip Gorski’s work as an example of the former, and Nichole Flores’, the latter. In contrast, I argue that we must engage aesthetics on its own terms in order to understand how nationalist aesthetics functions in political motivations. Utilizing Deleuze’s and Guattari’s description of fascistic desire in Anti-Oedipus, I conclude that what distinguishes white Christian nationalism aesthetically from other political movements is that it is boring. In my final section, I explore possible interventions for Christian theorists to engage political aesthetics in tandem with, yet distinguished from, ethics.
In this paper I establish a new theoretical framework that presents iḥsān as an overarching tenet of the Qurʾānic worldview. The triliteral Arabic root of iḥsān is ḥ.s.n., its meaning combines the values of beauty and goodness together, it occurs 194 in the Qurʾān. Through a comprehensive and holistic intra-Qurʾānic investigation, I trace the different occurrences of the root to analyze the conceptual meaning of iḥsān in the Qurʾān guided by the tools of literary analysis and Arabic morphology. The findings show how the fusion of ethics and aesthetics, represented in iḥsān, reflect a Qurʾānic epistemology that speaks of God and creation, and acts as a catalyst for universal harmony.
Toni Morrison’s Paradise depicts a community of refuge, called the Convent, for women of color who have borne the brunt of racism, sexism, poverty, and any number of various other ills in their lives. Together they find community and healing, joy and sustenance. The Convent has utopic aspects, then, but it is no utopia. It is very much this-worldly. Nevertheless, in its non-domination and relationality, we can count it as a heterotopia, a form of life that exhibits ideals in the midst of the messiness and imperfection of actual life. Utopias are thoroughly aestheticized, and they typically involve a form of beauty: political beauty. This is the case for the community at the Convent, although as a heterotopia, it is a flawed beauty. As such, it is an important imaginative resource while avoiding the typical pitfalls of utopias: escapism and totalitarian homogeneity.
This session highlights the work of African women theologians who are noteworthy creators and innovators in the various fields of religion, spirituality, and religious activism. African women theologians have addressed religious, environmental, socio-economic, political, health, gender equality, and other related issues that affect the African continent, yet traditional gender bias, economic status, domestic and occupational constraints, and racist, colonial, and class norms have obscured the noteworthy character of their lives and scholarly work. This session contextualizes issues of colonial bias and maps how African women theologians overcome coloniality in their works.
Esther Mombo's teaching areas are in world Christianity, women, and theology. Esther is a graduate of St. Paul’s, University, Trinity College Dublin and University of Edinburgh. Esther is a member of the Circle of Concerned Women Theologians and Coordinator of East African Region. Esther served as co-chair of the Commission of Education and Ecumenical formation of the World Council of Churches, Advisor of Education for All Africa Conference of Churches.
This paper attempts to conceptualize African women’s theology at the intersection of embodied spirituality and theological imagination through the lens of Afua Kuma’s Christology. A pioneering figure in African women’s theologizing, Madam Afua Kuma was the quintessential oral theologian. Her deeply embodied theological imagination invokes a Jesus that is intimately connected to and yet transcends the boundaries of her Christian and indigenous religious cosmologies and worldviews, and the realities of her religio-politico and socio-cultural situation. This paper, therefore, will locate Afua Kuma Christological imagination and lived experiences within the intersection of African women’s theology, Christianity and African indigenous spiritualities. It will engage the (re)negotiation of African women’s agency as well as the utilization of embodied spirituality and theological imagination as redemptive currencies in decolonial methodologies and epistemologies. The implication of such (de/re)constructive processes could possibly provide regenerative nuances in current discourses within World/Global Christianity.
One of the key methodologies employed by the circle of concerned African women theologians (the Circle) is that of documenting lived experiences. Often, this depicts a person’s experiences and choices, thus allowing us a glimpse into whom they are and a knowledge of what influences their philosophy. It is with this in mind, that this paper seeks to unpack the life and times of Hannah Wangeci Kinoti, the first female professor in the department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Nairobi -Kenya and a founder member of the Circle. Employing a combination of the narrative approach and literature review, the paper discusses her early years, education, involvement in the Circle, her works and finally death. Of interest is her contribution in the circle through her exposition of African ethics and a communitarian philosophy that synthesizes African communal values and Christianity to produce a liberative life affirming theology.
Leading Ghanaian Pentecostal-Charismatic scholar, Dr. Comfort Max-Wirth Phragmos-Kusi works to educate and lead others on a journey decolonizing African Pentecostalism-Charismatic praxis and theology. Her work as a pastor-teacher, religious-political scholar, and lecturer at the University of Ghana in Accra, is pivotal. She paves the way for religious decolonialism through the methodology of life-affirming, Pentecostal truth-telling. In this biography, I will work to unpack her story as a way to understand current West African women’s impact in the de-colonialism of religion, specifically within the Ghanaian Pentecostal-Charismatic Church. Her story can serve as an example and innovative model in which African women theologian’s stories can be disseminated and shared.
This paper seeks to unpack African women theologians and epistemologies as they navigate their faith between social justice activism and decoloniality in Kenya. It aims to document and increase the biographical coverage of Kenyan women theologians and actors from Evangelical and Pentecostal church movements who are not only inspiring and leading social justice movements but are also generating significant social change within their respective church ministries and communities in Kenya and beyond. I appropriate this analogy of an African three-legged fireside research methodology as a site for community making, knowledge sharing, and deep listening to generate biographical data on African women theologians negotiating ministry and social justice.
Jeannie Dove was a 20th century Black African woman who pioneered the teaching and practice of Christian Science in Ghana, applying its theology in the context of the Global South and in a society emerging from colonial rule. The theology of Christian Science interrelates with its practice of spiritual healing. This paper explores how the healing theology of Christian Science was mediated by Dove’s Ghanaian identity. A distinctive aspect of American-founded Christian Science is its lack of a traditional Western missionary apparatus. Its primary messenger is a text, Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Dove wrote about how she encountered this book, and first applied it to her own economic and health concerns, deeply imprinted with her African experience. She came to believe, according to interviews and articles, that her new religion offered a path to liberation from economic, sanitary, and social problems resulting, in part, from colonialist hegemony. For Dove, this changemaking was a rooted, therapeutic practice that offered relief from suffering in the form of a public ministry of Christian healing. Dove’s biography provides windows into her contextualization of Christian Science as a liberating theology she believed was relevant in twentieth-century Sub-Saharan Africa.
Alphama Kanyuru Kinyua was a prominent African woman theologian who dedicated her life to promoting gender justice and women’s empowerment. With a deep commitment to her faith and a passion for social justice, Alphama advocated for the rights of women and girls, challenging patriarchal systems and promoting gender equality in all spheres of life. As a theologian, she drew on her deep knowledge of African traditions and cultures and her extensive education and research to develop the theologies rooted in African women’s experiences. Through her teachings, writing, and public speaking engagements, Alphama inspired and mobilized women across the continent to take action and fight for their rights. Her advocacy work led to numerous achievements, including establishing women’s empowerment programs. Her tireless efforts have earned her recognition nationally and internationally. Her legacy continues to inspire a new generation of African women theologians to advocate for gender justice and women’s empowerment.
Conventional histories of 20th century U.S. American evangelicalism have tended to focus on the emergence and proliferation of a mainstream evangelical movement characterized by its theological, social, and political conservatism, as well as its high degree of cultural homogeneity. Furthermore, by consistently portraying evangelicals as more or less monolithic, scholarly and popular narratives alike often overlook the historical contingency of some of contemporary evangelicalism’s most defining characteristics, obscuring both the movement’s internal diversity and its ongoing definitional struggles in the process. Isaac Sharp’s The Other Evangelicals reconsiders canonical histories of 20th century evangelicalism from the point of view of several of its forgotten constituencies and marginalized figures: liberal evangelicals, Black evangelicals, progressive evangelicals, feminist evangelicals, and gay evangelicals. Featuring scholars doing groundbreaking work on the racial, sexual, and gendered history of contemporary evangelicalism, this author-meets-critics panel will explore the ways in which historical and contemporary evangelical actors have shaped, defined, and constructed mainstream evangelical identity.
Responding to this year’s conference theme, “La Labor de Nuestras Manos,” this author-meets-critics roundtable focuses on a brand-new book about Reiki, the therapeutic practice that involves transmitting energy from the hands to heal self and others. Just as Reiki channels flows of energy, Justin B. Stein’s *Alternate Currents* (forthcoming from University of Hawai`i Press in September 2023) tracks transnational flows of people, ideas, and ritual practice throughout the “North Pacific Intersystem.” Matching the expansive scope of Stein’s wide-ranging and creative book, this panel will bring together specialists in Japanese, Asian American, and North American religions to discuss how a Japanese American woman turned Reiki into a global therapeutic practice.
This panel harnesses the works of such as Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Sarah Elizabeth Wright to reflect, respond and critique the characterization and embodiment of the spiritual practice of Black women in modern literature. How does language, storytelling and the choreosonic murmurings in modern African-American literature centered around women signal joy, despair, hope, and trauma wedded to flight, freedom, wailing, mothering, transgressive acts, personal intimacies and the ongoing survival of Black women? How do we as writers and readers interrogate situations where faith that provides uplift or challenges the identity of characters in a narrative? From various registers these papers explore power dynamics, meditations on the provenance and purpose of one’s life, agency, opportunities and threats. And, they ask us as readers, writers and educators to consider the benefits and challenges of working with these kinds of sources as teaching tools, and sources of knowledge formation.
The literary genius of Toni Morrison extends beyond her revered novels, children’s books, poetry, plays, and song cycle lyrics. Few outside the opera world are familiar with her libretto for _Margaret Garner_, a 21st-century opera inspired by her novel_Beloved_ and the true story of an enslaved mother who made the ultimate sacrifice to ensure freedom for herself and her children. Premiering in 2005, this acclaimed production is a prime source for theological reflection and a repository of the African American community's ancestral cultural memories and faith traditions. Morrison’s historic imagination presents a portrait of antebellum life, portraying one enslaved woman’s humanity, faith, religious traditions, and quest for freedom.
What if anything is the difference between the stories and motivations of enslaved Africans in America risking everything to escape to freedom and migrants attempting to cross the southern borders of America today, risking everything seeking an unknown, elusive, imagined freedom.
Since ameliorating archival silencing of Black women requires a shift in how scholars hear Black women, this paper listens between lines for the noisiness of Black women’s religious cultures in twentieth century Black American literature. I argue that Black women make religious noise that offers a “choreosonic” critique of the archive. First, I situate Black women and their archival silencing within a historical context of the modern West’s degradation of the so-called lesser senses and the racialization of sound. Then, I delve into an analysis of three noisy scenes from Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), and Zora Neale Hurston’s (1938) Tell My Horse. Through a choreosonicity that critiques origins, hierarchy, and order, these literary giants introduce scholars to Black women whose religious noises call the silencing structures of the archive into question and invite scholars to do the same.
This paper reads Black women’s archival engagements and resulting literary work for the religious matter this literature is based upon and reproduces. Whereas connections between the archive, religion, and Black women’s history and literature are readily made in the body of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Black-authored work (Carby 1987; Tate 1992; Higginbotham 1993; Ernest 2004; Maffly-Kipp 2010), I argue that they are also at work in later twentieth-century writing. I read Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved with Beverly Jenkins’s Indigo, the most commented-upon work of contemporary Black historical popular romance by scholars and readers alike. Drawing upon Julie Dash, Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh, Darlene Clark Hine, Christina Sharpe, and others, I show how the provenance of each novel’s historical, archival inspiration reveals both a religious basis and religious productivity at work. These connections expand the breadth of literary work significant to a Black women’s readership that read across genre.
This paper considers how mothering, spiritual practice, and desires for survival intersect in the life of Mariah Upshur, the protagonist at the center of Sarah Elizabeth Wright’s 1969 novel This Child’s Gonna Live. Set in 1930s eastern Maryland, the reading audience hears a narrative voice not often heard in American literature—a Black woman living in a poor, fishing town named Tangierneck. This paper engages literary, textual, and archival methods and analyses to examine the interiority and possibilities of Black maternal spiritual life. By connecting Wright’s work to the Black mothering literary prototypes in Toni Morrison’s novels, Black feminists and womanists’ engagements with these literary tropes, and the politics of Black motherhood forged in places of abject poverty, environmental racism, and misogynoir, this paper considers how the intimacies born out of a connection to one’s children and desires for community help to preserve Black women’s faith, interiority, and material lives.
By juxtaposing the queer protagonists of Toni Morrison’s Sula and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple with contemporary black queer living texts, I will illuminate a more pluralistic theorizing of liberatory womanist leadership. In this paper, I will explore literary and autobiographical texts to interrogate moral lessons gleaned from lesbian leadership specifically highlighting the role of testimony as a trope for communal salvation. With attention to past fictional influencers (Sula and Nel from Sula and Celie and Shug from The Color Purple) and current religious activists, my paper will examine womanist markers of ethical leadership such as truth-telling, agency, and communal empowerment. Ultimately, I contend that by closely observing “transgressive” women through the lens of womanist and feminist queer theory and theologies of redemption, we can gain tools for expanding notions of moral leadership.
This panel highlights the complicated relationships sacred spaces have with their broader social-cultural contexts. Rather than viewing space as static, authors in this panel will reveal sacred spaces as dynamic, being shaped by the great variety of individuals who frequent them. Taken together, the case studies provide an important examination of the interconnected nature of Chinese religious landscapes with diverse facets of religion, culture, politics, and society. Authors furthermore push scholarship on space and place, as they complicate the understanding of: how sacrality is imagined in medieval China; the gendering and multifaceted identities of Buddhist nunneries; the mobility of rituals and place-making in motion; political ecology as a means of providing comprehensive overviews of sacred sites; and how religious geography is influenced by linguistic characteristics. Spanning across time periods and disciplines, these case studies will collectively provide important insight into the complexity of space, place, and sacrality in Chinese religions.
This paper investigates important aspects of the Buddhist re-imagining of China’s
sacred geography by analyzing relevant narratives in the medieval monk Daoxuan’s 道宣
collection of miracle tales, the Ji Shenzhou sanbao gantong lu 集神州三寶感通錄 (abbr. Record
of Miracles). The question of Daoxuan’s relation to ‘place’ and how he wrote about different
sacred sites will inform much of this discussion. There will be three parts to this paper, of which
the first will provide background information on two sacred structure types: monasteries and
pagodas. The second section will give a brief Buddhist history of ‘place’ in China, examining
mountains in the medieval Chinese imaginaire as well as the figure of Liu Sahe 劉薩河 and his
role in localising Buddhist sacred geography. The final part will investigate Daoxuan’s relation
to ‘place’, with particular attention directed at Mount Zhongnan 終南山.
Although monastic spaces in the Song have received some scholarly attention, monasteries and nunneries are often treated without distinction, despite their well-documented physical separation during this period. Relying on a diversity of Song sources, rather than focusing exclusively on nuns and their activities, this paper examines the nunnery as a socio-religious center. In this context, I seek to highlight the various functions the Buddhist nunnery fulfilled during the Song, including religious, medical, economic, and even penal functions. I also seek to complicate the persisting notion that nunneries often acted as sanctuaries offering Chinese women an alternative and more self-directed lifestyle. My overarching aim is to demonstrate how this space intersected people from different social strata who utilized it in diverse ways and ascribed it different imports.
Since at least the fifth century, ethical concern for animals and the aspiration to generate karmic merit have inspired people in China to release animals into nature and save them from the butcher’s knife. Animal release, especially when conducted as a communal event that follows a set of procedures, could take place in rivers, lakes, as well as artificial and natural ponds in monastic and non-monastic spaces. Focusing on the period from the sixth to the sixteenth centuries, this paper investigates the changing sites for performing animal release in Chinese Buddhist and Daoist contexts. Drawing mainly on ritual manuals, anecdotal accounts, and temple gazetteers, this paper points out that the selection of sites for releasing animals was informed by an interplay of political, ritual, geomantic, and ecological considerations. The history of the specialized animal-release pond demonstrates how a religious practice could shape monastic and natural landscapes in concrete ways.
This paper situates temple cults at the core of processes generating different types of landscapes, including: 1) Natural landscapes consisting of geomantic forces and scenic locations that inspire people to write poetry and construct monuments, including sites for ritual activities; 2) Sacred landscapes featuring temples, rotational worship and pilgrimage systems that are linked to commercial, irrigation, and marriage networks. I explore these issues through a case study of the Lianzuoshan
Guanyin Temple (蓮座山觀音寺/觀音亭), a leading Hakka sacred site in Daxi 大溪 (Taoyuan City, northern Taiwan). Founded during the late eighteenth century, this temple’s scenic setting attracted financial and literary patronage from a wide range of local elites, while its location along northern Taiwan’s tea and camphor trade routes resulted in its growth into a vital node of ritual activities for Hakka inhabitants throughout the region.
The empirical research linking linguistic geography with spatial analysis of Chinese religion has been suggested and undertaken by Willem Grootaers 賀登崧 (1919-1999) and his students (Thomas) Li Shiyu 李世瑜and Wang Fushi王輔世 in the 1940s. They conducted an extensive survey on local dialect and folklore in North China, including fieldwork in Datong 大同, Wanquan 萬全, and Xuanhua 宣化. However, their research was neglected by both linguists and religion scholars for a long time. Grootaers’ contributions to religious geography, what he calls “folklore geography,” have not yet been properly assessed. This paper proposes to revisit Willem Grootaers’ contributions to the study of Chinese religious spaces and landscapes. It will assess Grootaers’ innovative findings and discuss the potential for further research based on his method.
Since at least the mid-1980s anthropologists have been wrestling with the implications of critically examining their own positionality in research. Yet, one of the often underexplored dimensions of this reflexive turn has been the very real possibility that a researcher’s identity and/or self-positioning in the field might lead to disappointing results, serious impasses of communication, or even outright failure in research. Can something still be learned from these cases? How might an anthropologist’s missteps nonetheless lead to new knwoledge, either about their subjects or themselves? What happens if they do not? Drawing on insights from their interactions with on-line diasporic Muslim communities, Islamic schools in India, American ritual magicians, and theology students, panelists offer insights into how they have responded to erstwhile failures in ethnographic practice.
In this paper, I present the ways I navigate issues of ethics and relationality in my digital ethnographic research on the women of my community, the Dawoodi Bohras, and the need to contend with positionalities during this process. On one hand where my status as a member of the community and social media content production provides access, relatability, and understanding, it also places certain expectations and demands, particularly for the outcome of the research. This process is also complicated by the fact that the Bohras as a minority Muslim community maintained privacy for fear of persecution which has resulted in very little research on the community and that there are also concerns for revealing knowledges that the community wishes to keep private. I discuss how I navigate these sensitive ethical concerns through the method of refusal and embodying an ethics of care which prioritize researcher, participant, and community concerns.
Based on my ethnographic experience exploring the pious space of an Islamic school and the mundane caregiving practices among young Muslim women in north India, I reflect on my experience with my interlocutors to uncover power relations and the politics of refusal embedded in this ethnographic practice. I reflect on how my ambiguous insider-outsider position in an ‘at-home’ ethnography affects my relationships with my interlocutors and the ethics of compromise therein. How does the cultural capital of my interlocutors' Islamic knowledge compare with my acquired capital of western education? Arguably, the complex maneuverings of identities, politics of knowledge, capital and refusal surfacing in ‘native ethnographies’ require further explication, and which remains the core concern of this paper.
Drawing on fieldwork with contemporary magic users in the greater Los Angeles area, this paper focuses on questions and anxieties that arise when the research requires a scholar to bring their personal life into the field. The magic users I engage with are well versed in psychotherapeutic language and often describe their own magic in this language. Engaging with this work in earnest meant not just opening up my personal life to the magical rites and practices, but wrestling with the efficacy of this magic. This paper explores the questions that arise about the role of the researcher and their responsibilities to the groups they research. It argues that the tension and discomfort of this proximity produces valuable insights into the nature of anthropological work on modern magic. The audience will be asked to experience this firsthand by participating in a shortened version of one of these rituals
Specific pedagogical issues arise when students come from religious backgrounds, such that when we speak of teaching the anthropology of religion, we are also speaking of these students as research *subjects*. This paper draws insights from a doctoral seminar I have taught to theologians. The first challenge is to introduce the students to a different *way* of producing knowledge. The sensibilities necessary to produce text-based knowledge – a penchant for solitude, an eye for distinction and separation – do not serve well for a production of knowledge that requires ongoing interaction with people and a tolerance for ambiguity. Premature closure is a frequent habit, learned from producing knowledge from texts that have definite beginnings and endings, that religiously committed ethnographers often have to struggle to overcome. Having the students themselves do open-ended fieldwork can serve as a kind of safeguard against premature conceptual closure, both in the fieldwork and writing/representation phases.
On the centennial of the founding of Disney and Warner Bros, this panel convenes scholars to discuss the telling or narration of Disney's religious history and media presence. Topics include Disney as American New Thought, Disney's transformation from a Midwestern Protestantism to a type of civic religion, and how the tropes of villainy are articulated within Christian paradigms of dualism.
One of the most famous quotes attributed to Walt Disney – “If you can dream it, you can do it” – is noteworthy not only because it succinctly summarizes Walt’s modus operandi for his company, but also because he never said it. That one can find this quote attributed to Walt on all kinds of merchandise only shows the easy elision of this manufactured philosophy with many Disney fans’ (and Americans’) self-understanding.
This paper, excerpted from a larger project, places this quote and the Disney legacy within the context of American religious thought. Drawing on examples from Disney’s stories, films, and parks, the paper argues that Disney is best religiously understood as a new form of American New Thought, bolstered by American Dream ideology and traditional Protestant virtues. To say Disney is religion is to acknowledge the way Disney braids together familiar American idioms, creating a distinctly American religious imagination.
This paper tells the story of how the Walt Disney Company’s first century moves from an implicit Midwestern Protestantism (though not the Congregationalism of Walt Disney’s childhood), to a mid-twentieth century civic religion. Ultimately, twenty-first century Disney is a panoply of spiritualities and cultures. Simultaneously, Disney as a brand has gradually become quasi-religious—deeply “religion adjacent”-- itself.
Walt Disney built no church on Disneyland’s Main Street. His daughter Diane said this was to avoid offending any denominations, to make it welcoming for all. In sublimating institutional religion and promoting “magic,” Disney began as an entertainment company but gradually became a secular religion. Disney is the most successful tradition of all because, while it emerges from Christian origins, they are sufficiently vague to expand infinitely-- and its stories are so pliable that they can incorporate every religion and no religion, all at once.
Disney effectively franchises the Christian tradition of kosmic kombat into a brand of “villainy” across animation and transmedia. Disney mythmakers stage their villains within marketable religious dramas like Fantasmic! and Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom – theme park attractions which, first, produce “stirring legends of the triumph of good over evil” and, second, reify Disney’s Christian-inspired brand of positivity. Disney’s transmedial extended universe allows defeated villains to resurface as foes kosmically tethered in kombat against Disney heroes – e.g., “The Rise of Scar” children’s playset from 2018. Inspired by the villain’s resurrection in the Disney Junior animated series The Lion Guard, this playset depicts the revenant-lion as a floating demon head of flame. Scar centers the playset flanked by plastic fire pieces, a snake devotee, collapsing bridge, and lava ball catapult. The commercial transformation of this villain demonstrates Disney’s popular celebration of kombat and the modern sensationalism of religion into media entertainment.
