Research — Jeffrey Wheatley

Research Summary

I am a teacher and researcher who studies religion, culture, and politics with a historical focus on the United States. My current project is on religious fanaticism as an object of secular policing.

To understand the developments and movements of Christianity throughout its 2000-year history, I pay attention to the themes of empire, mission, church and state, and the shifting and contested boundaries of what constitutes Christianity. Christian traditions have always existed in relation with other religions, including Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and indigenous religions in Africa and the Americas. Furthermore, Christian belief and practice has always been internally diverse and contested.

The study of secularism provides an analytical framework for thinking about how secular institutions define what is and is not “religion” in accordance with their own priorities and assumptions. I understand modernity as defined not by secularization (the privatization or disappearance of religion), but more by the mythic and strategic deployment of differences between religion and politics.

My research explores how claims and practices of white supremacy emerged within the context of Euro-American colonial conquest. Euro-Americans referenced religious practices and beliefs, as much as biomarkers, to legitimate claims of sovereignty and “racial” superiority. My work asks: how do our understandings of religious difference (fanaticism, superstition, cults, world religions, etc) reify or challenge this history of racist violence?

Current Projects

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Policing Religious Fanaticism

This project investigates how Americans in the nineteenth century applied the language of religious fanaticism to individuals, communities, and populations deemed dangerous. Examining diverse topics from Nat Turner to evangelical revivals to Filipino insurgents, I examine the relationship between Protestant and secular conceptions of sovereignty, authenticity, and violence, with a focus on the mechanisms of policing marginalized and racialized religious communities.

The Many Uses of Cephalopods in Propaganda

This side-project collects and analyzes visual media of cephalopods ensnaring nations and communities. Connecting the rise of the use of tentacled sea creature imagery in US culture to discoveries of giant squid in the 1870s, this research explores the connection between natural science and cultural expressions of alien and subversive bodies.

Black Catholicism

This side-project looks at Black Catholicism in the late nineteenth-century US, with a focus on the Church of St. Benedict the Moor in New York City. It examines the overlapping, and at times conflicting, priorities of a predominantly white Catholic hierarchy with the various perspectives of Black Americans who rejected or embraced the Church.

The Devil, Sexuality, and Race

This side-project considers the devil as simultaneously a religious and a secular idea, offering new ways to critically analyze early modern forms racial supremacy and ideas about sexuality, masculinity, and femininity.