Meet the Faculty

Sylvester A. Johnson

• Associate Professor, Department of Religious Studies
• Director of Graduate Studies, 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 research and publishing are guided by an interest in explaining human destruction as a persisting array of strategies, in light of data about religion and race in America, especially in relationship to the histories of African American religions. Why, for instance, have practices deemed reprehensible like religious hatred, ethnic cleansing, and government repression remained so integral to modern societies that understand themselves to uphold high standards of freedom, human rights, civility, and social progress? In order to answer questions of this nature, we must study the linkages between practices of human destruction and the ostensibly virtuous categories or celebrated ideals that shape our modern social sensibilities. My work as a scholar of Religion in the Americas is driven by this mode of inquiry. My first book, The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity: Race, Heathens, and the People of God (2004), examines the history of Christianization among African Americans. I explain how Americans widely embraced the biblical legend of Noah’s son Ham as a means of incorporating African peoples into a biblical style of imagining human history, racial origins, and religious identity. My central argument emphasizes that this Christianization process required the cultivation of racial and religious hatred to promote the idea that becoming a “Christian people of God” was the culmination of brutality in the past (slavery and the Middle Passage) and the divine imperative for a futuristic racial agenda (the extermination of “heathen” peoples and their religions in Africa and the Americas). This Christianization history has been sacralized as the pinnacle of African American history (viz., the black church), as an innocent and noble ascent from black barbarism to black Christian civility. This hagiographic historiography, I argue, veils the destructive, even murderous consequences of Christian identity that were central to black and white American Christianities.

I am currently writing a history of colonialism and African American religions. This book project examines the complicated relationship between black religions and colonialism as a historic and on-going American phenomenon both within and beyond US borders. My research for this book draws on archival and theoretical sources about black religions within the context of repressive American governmentality from the surveillance and suppression of African religions under white settler colonialism to the explicitly murderous Counter-Intelligence Program of the Department of Justice in the twentieth century, which targeted African American religions that opposed white racist rule. I draw on the data about African American religions to inform an elaborate argument about the nature of freedom and democracy in their historical manifestation as pillars of an American empire. Because these religions emerged under the sign of freedom, they offer especially valuable insight into the linkages between brutality and the democratic freedom so integral to the modern American nation-state.

Research Interests

• Religion, Empire, and Democracy
• Scriptures and Race
• Early Modern Atlantic Religion
• Sexuality and Religion

Courses Recently Taught

• Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcom X in American Religion
• Religion and Sex in America
• African American Religions
• Chosen Peoples in America
• American Religion and Politics
• Religion in American Culture

Publication Highlights

Books

Colonialism and African American Religions, 1500-2000 (in progress).

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

Articles/Essays

“Colonialism, Biblical World-Making, and Temporalities in Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative,” Church History 77 (2008): 1003-1024

“Religion Proper and Proper Religion : Arthur Fauset and the Study of African American Religions,” in The New Black Gods : Arthur Huff Fauset and the study of African American Religions, ed. Edward Curtis IV and Danielle Sigler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009)

"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.