I write and speak on a wide range of topics in American religion and American studies, but I specialize in religion, culture, and politics in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My central questions probe the intersections of American modernity and Protestant and post-Protestant religious modernity in the United States, which means I think a lot about religion, secularism, and spirituality. Race, religion and psychology, mass culture, religious liberalism, cosmopolitanism and internationalism, and poltics, formal and informal, all figure into my research.
My current book in progress is One World: America's Religious Battles over the United Nations and Global Citizenship. One World chronicles how Americans in the Cold War era (1945-1989) thought about, and fought about, the United Nations and the idea of “one world” in religious terms. The dream of "one world" is among the most enduring, seductive, dangerous, and beautiful dreams in human history. It is the dream of prophets and tyrants, conquerors and liberators, at once utopian and dystopian—perhaps, inevitably and tragically, always so. My research has taken me to archival collections across the United States and Europe, and introduces to US religious history a wide range of actors and organizations for the first time: dreamy theosophist and mystics; flinty diplomats; UN meditators and prayer warriors (pro and con); the surprising religious histories of UNESCO, UNICEF, and the WHO; and a cast of ordinary Americans who grappled in their own ways with the religious meaning of America and what it might mean to be a citizen of the world.
I am also at work on a history of "spiritual but not religious" in the US, a book designed for undergraduate classroom use.