Public health campaigns among Catholic Mexican American populations in New Mexico in the mid-twentieth century often relied on the expertise of anthropologists and sociologists to help tailor the campaigns to Mexican American culture. Social scientists produced several reports based on fieldwork that suggested that New Mexican village religious practices and beliefs, often referred to as “folk Catholicism,” were durable barriers to embracing scientific healthcare standards. This article uses those reports to reveal and analyze the role that public health campaigns and social science researchers played in defining and challenging Hispano religious healing traditions. It likewise examines the various intersections of science and racializing discourse in the reports. I argue that these social scientific studies of Spanish-speaking, New Mexican village culture were intended to facilitate the “right” kind of assimilation to Anglo cultural norms around health, one that paradoxically aimed to include Hispanos in modern medicine while simultaneously defining essential religio-racial difference. The regulation of Hispano bodies rested on social scientific discourses that racialized religion, science, and health.

During the late nineteenth century’s Gilded Age, Protestant philanthropists, policymakers, social reformers, and religious leaders often claimed that charity “pauperized” the poor by cultivating dependence and preventing them from helping themselves. Acting on this theory of pauperization, prominent social Christians developed innovative forms of charity with support from wealthy industrialists, who hoped to ameliorate poverty in a way that maintained industrial capitalism and its fundamental social order. To explore the influence and legacy of pauperization, this article examines the phenomenon of urban “institutional churches,” an ecclesiastical form that featured a wide array of buildings, organizations, and subsidiary institutions. Rather than surveying the entire institutional church movement, the article draws extensively on the previously unexamined records, meeting minutes, and congregational publications of a pioneering and paradigmatic institutional church in New York City. Led and bankrolled by the financier J. Pierpont Morgan, this church became known as “the most notable institution of its kind in the world.” While historians typically have depicted institutional churches as early expressions of the Social Gospel’s progressive response to poverty, institutional churches illustrate how conservative social Christians used churches to justify their belief in the power of plutocratic private philanthropy over a more active redistributionist state and tax-funded welfare policies.

Since its inception, evangelical Protestantism has attracted passionate converts and produced anguished deserters: people with intense conversion experiences who have later chosen to flee their churches and the peculiar stream of Christianity that once held their devotion. In past generations, a person exiting evangelicalism left community into seclusion. However, I argue that in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, post-evangelical feminists used digital media to create online post-evangelical feminist communities that alleviated isolation for those leaving conservative evangelical communities. This paper explores the invention and adoption of digital technologies in light of the evangelical history of media innovation. Using blogposts, social media posts, and interviews, it examines the experiences of twenty-first century post-evangelical feminists who participated in digital communities. The metaphor of outposts in “the wilderness,” commonly used by post-evangelical feminists, suggests that digital communities acted as havens of theologically and politically progressive sociality outside evangelical institutions. These communities provided an important function for those early twenty-first-century post-evangelical feminists who left evangelicalism but maintained a Christian faith. Those marginalized by their gender and their theological positions used digital media as a structure to forge religious belonging in a period defined by the rise of the religiously unaffiliated. This history illuminates the promises and the limitations of digital religious communities.

This article examines the place of colonial Jews and Judaism in the Protestant imagination through the history of Hebrew printing in early America. While scholarship in Christian Hebraism has emphasized points of commonality and interreligious dialogue through shared texts between Judaism and Christianity, this study explores treatments of Hebrew that foreclosed collaboration and conversation between the two groups. The essay offers the term “Protestant Hebrew” to describe how colonial Anglo-American Protestants performed Hebrew to support ministerial authority and to imagine a receptive English-speaking captive Jewish audience for their works. In contrast, diasporic Sephardic Jews treated Hebrew as a necessary instrument for sustaining identity and communication networks across the Atlantic. This disparity was most evident through the publishing culture around Hebrew text types. Colonial printing presses carried just enough Hebrew type for Protestant productions to occasionally adorn their text with Hebrew characters, but never enough to treat it as its own language. Limited types would become a point of frustration for Jewish and Protestant authors who had to rely on printers overseas or on manuscript circulation to publish in Hebrew to a wider audience. Protestant Hebrew demonstrates how the constraints of Anglo-Protestant culture could materialize through the very mechanisms of colonial publishing.