Meet the Faculty

Sylvester A. Johnson

• Assistant Professor, Department of Religious Studies

Education

• Ph.D. at Union Theological Seminary 2002

Contact Information

Background

• Seminar Fellow, Young Scholars in American Religion, Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture (2005-2006)
• Recipient, American Academy of Religion Best First-Book Award, History of Religions

My book the Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity examines the way nineteenth-century Americans used the biblical legend of Noah to claim that one of Noah’s sons, Ham, was the ancestor of the black race.  Using this narrative to map racial origins was actually more fundamental than using the same to justify slavery.  Of chief focus in my study is the dilemma of African American Christians, who employed this style of myth-making to claim Ham as an ancestor and thus locate themselves in ‘biblical history’ while simultaneously accepting the attending meanings that vilified Ham and Ham’s descendants as the most evil human beings in history. 

I wrote this book because I wanted to examine the problems of chosenness, racial philosophies of history, and the strategies that American audiences have employed, incurring tremendous problems, in order to read modern racial identities into ‘biblical history’ as a means of authenticating themselves.  The resulting study argues that the idea of being people of God, particularly in its American expressions, has depended upon a configuration of identity violence that has frequently included the participation of those on the underside of such violence. 

My ongoing research is concerned with the relationship between scriptures and race in the United States, the role of biblical narrative in the American religious imagination, and the interplay of race, gender, and sex in the constitution of modern identities.  Of particular interest to me is the work emerging from cultural theoretical approaches to examining textuality, semiotics, and the role of “otherness” in religious identity construction. 

I am currently working on a history of colonialism and African American religions.

Research Interests

• Colonialism and African American religions
• Missionary Religion in the United States
• Scriptures and cultural theory
• Religion, race and historiography

Courses Recently Taught

• African American Religions
• Chosen Peoples in America
• American Religion and Politics
• Religion in American Culture

Publication Highlights

Books

The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity: Race, Heathens, and the People of God. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004 

Articles

"Tribalism and Religion in the Work of Richard Wright,” Literature and Theology 20, no. 2 (2006): 171–188.

"New Israel, New Canaan: The Bible, the People of God, and the American Holocaust,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 59, nos. 1-2 (2005): 25-39.