Policing Fanaticism, Religion, & Race in the American Empire, 1830–1930

Wheatley, Jeffrey Thomas

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-mqk0-7r86

Work

Policing Fanaticism, Religion, & Race in the American Empire, 1830–1930

Public

Download PDF

Download All Files (.zip)

This dissertation investigates how US Americans in the nineteenth century began to apply the category of religious fanaticism to individuals and communities deemed dangerous. Contributing to scholarship on secularism, racial governance, and American religious history, this dissertation argues that fanaticism is not a neutral category of description. It tracks how a variety of Americans—including Protestant ministers, government agents, and ethnologists—used the language of fanaticism to strategically govern racialized and marginalized communities. Americans, however, have not always agreed on what causes fanaticism. Nor have they agreed on who should count as a fanatic. The chapters include analyses of Nat Turner’s 1831 anti-slavery insurrection, Isaac Taylor’s 1833 book Fanaticism, white Protestant polemics about revivalism, controversies over abolitionism, and warfare between the US and Filipino militants who claimed for themselves supernatural powers. This critical history of religious fanaticism demonstrates the power of religion and race in the US empire, highlighting the limits of religious freedom and the ongoing contestation over what types of religion Americans find acceptable and what types must be targeted for elimination.

Creator