About

Kathryn Lofton is the Lex Hixon Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies, as well as a Professor of History and Divinity at Yale University. She is a historian of religion with a focus on popular culture in the United States. Her early scholarly work examined the history of Christian modernism and fundamentalism, along with the historiography of African American religions. Lofton is the author of two books, 'Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon' (2011) and 'Consuming Religion' (2017), and has edited a collection on African-American women's historical writings. Her current research concentrates on the history of U.S. religions. Beyond her research, Lofton has contributed to academic publishing as an editor-at-large for The Immanent Frame, co-curated a web project on spirituality titled Frequencies, and co-edits a book series with the University of Chicago Press. At Yale, she has actively worked to enhance faculty governance, diversity, and community ethics, serving in various leadership roles including Chair of LGBT Studies, Chair of the Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Chair of the Department of Religious Studies, and Dean of Humanities. She has received multiple awards for her teaching and mentorship, including the Poorvu Family Award for Interdisciplinary Teaching, the Sarai Ribicoff Award, and the Graduate Mentor Award in the Humanities. Lofton teaches courses on religion in American history, new religious movements, secularism, religion and popular culture, religion and sexuality, and methods and theories in the study of religion.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Philosophy
• Epistemology
• Psychology
• Theology
• Social psychology
• Aesthetics
• Law
• History
• Media studies
• Gender studies

Selected publications

• Critical Karaoke Interlude IV

  2026-03-07

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Critical Karaoke Interlude IX

  2026-03-07

  book-chapterSenior author
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• Great Excitement Prevails: The American Lynching Myth

  Civil War history · 2025-07-16

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Religious Studies in a Billionaire's Era

  Religious Studies Review · 2024-12-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Since Religious Studies Review asked for reflections on the present and future of religious studies, survey data emerged suggesting Americans love singer-songwriter Taylor Swift and Americans increasingly revile universities. (Brenan 2023; Dellatto 2023) Since Religious Studies Review asked for reflections on the present and future of religious studies, 10/7 occurred. Since Religious Studies Review asked for reflections on the present and future of religious studies, a pop queen got even more queenly, Americans started to dislike universities even more, and violence in the eastern Mediterranean demonstrated again the determining role of religion in political and economic life. Since Religious Studies Review asked for reflections, I've been distracted. As of this writing, Taylor Swift is still on her unprecedented Eras Tour. She is slaying in every sense save the sashay. She can't dance very well but everything else she kills. I mean kills in all its senses; winning is something that always crushes something else. And Swift wins. She fills arenas on five continents, generates billions in consumer spending, and revitalizes local and national tourism industries. Onstage she serves nightly three-and-a-half hour performances to fans who sing along to every Swift-authored lyric and cheer her stage command. She dominates streaming services with new and re-recorded music. And in April 2024, one year after Religious Studies Review asked for reflections on the present and future of religious studies, she joined the Forbes World Billionaire's list, becoming one of the 2,781 people on the planet whose personal wealth is more than $1,000,000,000 (Martin 2024). Taylor Swift is among the most wealthy and popular Americans in the history of the United States. Meanwhile, Americans' confidence in higher education is at an all-time low. 32% of Americans have little or no confidence in higher education. When Gallup first measured confidence in higher education in 2015, 57% had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence, and 10% had little or none. Gallup draws from its polling that confidence has dropped among all key subgroups in the US population over the past two decades, but more so among Republicans. In 2023, all party groups showed some increase in the percentage with very little or no confidence and a decrease in the percentage saying they have some. Gallup explains that for those who lack confidence, their concerns lie in colleges pushing political agendas, not teaching relevant skills, and being overly expensive (Jones 2024). Students of religious studies have been thoughtful historians of conservative attacks on the political agendas of modern universities, situating these criticisms in a long arc of culture wars that began with colonization. Students of evangelicalism have had specific leadership in this analytic space since their scholarship repeatedly shows that being against higher education is a tentpole of the most statistically significant religious force in US history. “Great preachers cannot be made by technical pedagogy,” explained the evangelist Sam Jones' biographer, George Stuart, “Scholars, debaters, exegetes, and homilists may be produced in universities and theological seminaries, but preachers who reach and save men come from the school of experience which acquaints them with the varied heart throbs generated in the toil, hardships, sacrifices, and sufferings of themselves and their fellows.” While mainline Protestants built colleges and advocated their attendance to manufacture civil leaders of a not-yet civil country, evangelicals endorsed “Lessons From The School Of Experience” or the “university of rail splitting” (quoted in Lofton 2006, 100). Anti-intellectualism is central to evangelical politics and theological self-understanding, a subject Mark Noll's The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (1995) sought to redress. Scholars including Kate Bowler, Anthea Butler, Elesha Coffman, Darren Dochuk, Elizabeth Jemison, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Elizabeth Flowers, Emily Johnson, Gale Kenny, Matthew Sutton, Nicole Turner, Daniel Vaca, and Molly Worthen, have examined twentieth- and twenty-first-century Christian print culture, Christian political engagement, Christian race politics, and Christian gender politics, and, with overwhelming evidence, shown how anti-establishment and anti-intellectual performances define evangelical rhetoric, affect, and organization. None of these scholars has yet written about Taylor Swift, not least of which because Swift does not admit to evangelical belief, nor are her fans notably evangelical, though they are predominantly white and female-identified. The power of Swift, a white cisgender Christian-identified child of Tennessee, is inextricable from the country (country as in America and country as in genre of song) where she originated. Swift is not the only celebrity on the Forbes list. Forbes reports thirteen other celebrities—including Peter Jackson, Rihanna, Jay-Z, Steven Spielberg, and Oprah Winfrey—whose profits from brand partnerships, percentage of gross sales, and media holdings achieve this tax bracket. What distinguishes Swift is the sense that her fans and she accomplished this power together. “Fans are my favorite thing in the world. I've never been the type of artist who has that line drawn between their friends and their fans,” Swift says (TN Viral Desk 2024). Her fans provide the billions she earns through their devotional relationship to what she sings and how she shares herself in these songs and on social media. Taylor Swift does not perform tycoon. She acts toward her power like Princess Diana did before (Shome 2014). She's the people's billionaire. Among Swift's fans, also called Swifties, are undoubtedly those who agree that colleges push political agendas, don't teach relevant skills, and that college is too expensive. You can't have that much popularity and not represent among your followers a popular critique. Swift herself is no overt advocate for higher education, having eschewed it herself, creating another American exemplar for those who argue the skills universities teach don't help people really win. What interests me is how Swift's billionaire status lets scholars of the contemporary see what that emblem demands in a time when billionaires decide a great deal of media experience, political option, and academic life in the United States. Recently, billionaires have focused their capricious attentions specifically on higher education, offering criticisms of how institutions manage their populations to significant effect (Gura 2024). The billionaires are not only to blame for this stick-up since higher education has, for over fifty years, taken an increasing interest in private equity and venture capital, attaching its financial fortunes to their divinations (Wigglesworth 2024). Also, billionaires function as superhuman figures, and messing with earthly beings is what beings saturated with power mythically tend to do. What makes Taylor an amazing billionaire, for her fans, is how much she does the opposite of messing with them. She loves on them, giving them what they want. No star of stage or screen in history has better control over the mass distribution of their talent than Taylor Swift. To pair Taylor Swift and American universities as comparands is, therefore, a classic countering duo: one is what everyone delights to want; the other is what too many suffer to achieve. The payoff for universities isn't clear to anyone. The payoff for Taylor is felt immediately: she feels so her fans can feel it; she sings, and as she does, they feel more tuneful. The university has had moments of romantic attachment in its past, but such affinities seem now sepia delusions. The average cost of college tuition in the US for undergraduate students has more than tripled over the last sixty years. It's expensive, and it's unclear why. Paying for Eras tickets gives you a cathartic experience. Paying tuition leaves most American students in debt. Many humanities programs are facing existential threats, including religious studies. But beyond that there was already a developing rift between works that focus on the “lived religion” of people and works that focus on religion as a socially, even academically, constructed category. What are the stakes here? What is the core of the disagreement? In a field where theory has always been important, this debate at this moment seems especially resonant. In 1918, at the apex of his wealth, Ford was one of 18 billionaires in the United States (Peterson-Withorn 2017). In 2024, 806 individuals in the United States, including Taylor Swift, control more wealth than the 65 million or so households that make up the poorer half of the population (Mechanic 2024). Such inequality impacts every facet of American experience. Over the past fifteen years, as income inequality has soared in the United States, the power of American workers continues to diminish (Ghilarducci 2022). The minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, is lower than it was in the 1960s (Vega 2022). Poor people in the United States are poorer than they have ever been (Neate 2024). Most Americans believe the government should do more to address extreme wealth. The government never seems to organize any kind of a response to such a political call. Such federal flaccidity is no surprise. Consider, for example, recent interest in the movements of Taylor Swift's private plane. Tracking her private jet activity is, for her fans, an invasion of privacy and a misogynistic spotlight on a person who can't be individually to blame for fossil fuel emissions (Sung 2024). For environmental activists, billionaires are important to observe because they contribute a million times more carbon to the atmosphere than the average person. Congress agreed with the Swifties, including in the new Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) reauthorization bill, the option for private aircraft owners to request the government hide personally identifying information associated with their planes (Ropek 2024). Throughout history, celebrities have often been instruments of cultural fascism, normalizing the morality of individual profit and exacerbating social inequality. Billionaires are a genre of celebrity, famous for their capacity to get a lot of something, money, theologian Devin Singh argues has a long history of sacralization to support its gain (Singh 2018). A lot of people “wanna be a billionaire so fucking bad,” to quote Travie McCoy in his four-time platinum-certified single “Billionaire.” As a result, observers of billionaires who desire their ability to run the board rarely direct hate toward their dream occupation. Swift is a leader whose followers already established a unique commitment to her protection. They protect someone who reflects to them values they share. Any critics of Swift—whether those targeting her gender politics, lack of political involvement, or social privilege—are quickly attacked by Swifties. Taylor Swift gives already so much, so generously, her fans argue. Don't hate on a winner who doesn't hate. Engaging in substantive dialogue about their power is one thing billionaires rarely do. This is how they exist above the law and beyond legal and moral accountability; by being rich enough, they can buy exemptions, pressure, and shutter dissent. People sacralize billionaires because they hope to become one; billionaires dominate people, needing that domination to extract their monetary victory. Popular cultures, now largely owned by billionaire corporations, silence dissent, distract questions, and evade dialogue on the terms of its entertaining thrall. Popular cultures are also resources for inquiry and the resistance tough questions can represent. When I resist the distinction between lived religion and religion as a socially constructed category, it is because I think making such a distinction reveals more the latency of the shared evangelical epistemological heritage of scholars of religion in the US, where every land agreement embeds long Christian histories along the settler plot of capital gain. Evangelicals historically argue there is a real of experience that is opposed to the not real of academic knowledge. Such a distinction does not agree with the broad scholarly consensus in the study of religion, which is that critique and religion are synonymous. Tazeen Ali's The Women's Mosque of America (2022) offers vivid depictions of lived religion—of women working and worshipping in mosques. It simultaneously shows how those women engaged in the category of religion and understood it as something constructed by their imagination of authority. Joe Blankholm's The Secular Paradox (2022) carefully conveys how ambivalence about idea and practice organizes much secular community in America, how thinking and talking about religion is for many secular-identified people their lived religion. Scholars of religion repeatedly demonstrate that there is no practice of religion distinct from its practice of critique. Being evangelical is no less a critical posture than being Muslim or atheist—the difference is in the political sway of the critique. In the twenty-first century United States, electoral candidates worry much more about getting the Christian vote or the Swiftie vote than the Muslim or atheist vote. Why, then, does this divide persist between thinking there is a distinction between critique and practice? Nothing is more primary to the political dislike of universities than the sense that universities teach useless, politicized things, when what they ought to do is teach useful, real things. Why does this idea, this distinction between real and constructed, useful and useless, persist not only in conference prompts but also in congressional hallways and pundit panels? First and foremost, because among the many impoverished by American billionaires are college graduates saddled with loans (Elliott and Lewis 2013). Universities and colleges became unconscionably expensive, so hating them is isomorphic with hating the debt accrued to get jobs that yield nothing near to billionaire profits, much less a sustainable and nourished life. Second, because imagining that some people protect ideas and other people live real lives has long been a way to undermine the possibility that our lives could be otherwise. Evangelicals throughout American history have waged that personhood is a wrestle with something physical, real, challenging precisely because it is not ruled by human law. “To me,” said evangelist Sam Jones, “there is no better recommendation for a preacher than that he has raised the devil.” (quoted in Lofton 2006, 101) The scholar is a figure who takes up each of these words—me, recommendation, preacher, devil—and asks where they came from and why they are repeated. Scholars here do work historically connected across many geographies to forms called religion. The lived religion of the contemporary university is, among many other anthropological features, a situation of political attack. That this attack is buttressed by billionaires precisely arguing what scholars do is nothing but the social construction of things, and not real things, the real real things, is the reason why I invite scholars of religion now and in the future to work assiduously against the adaptation of such dichotomous thinking in our own. The habit of critique does not oppose the anthropology of the real. The real of religion, the part that takes off and becomes popular, is its critique. The thing about it people can't release because it makes them feel good. Feeling good is what people try to feel in all kinds of ways, and with all sorts of resultant measures. Swifties monitor critics of Swift as their own regular habit of religious criticism, defending their icon against outsider desecration. Nobody needs a university to teach them how to be a critic. Universities are simply one place where criticism is a devotional object. Departments are told their closures derive from budgetary concerns, sometimes deriving from claims about low enrollments. These are the terms of critics, which the study of religion knows is useful information to understand how religion operates. Citizens who pay for state-funded institutions and donors who contribute to public and private institutions often understand these closures as practical replies to contemporary realities, ceding a portrait of humanities departments as places that push political agendas, don't teach relevant skills, and are a luxury Americans can't afford. As departments of religious studies are being threatened by closures, the study of religion ought to historicize these reductions as a form of religious critique and religious intervention. American political life includes departments of religious studies as expendable in service to the really real that everyone needs to get wise to. Yet these closures could also be framed as the silencing of information, the silencing of criticism, those in power would rather not be heard. If departments of religious studies persist in universities and colleges, it will be a struggling survival, one that, at its best, would include louder counter-critique for the systems of power they occupy and the economic precarity power produces. The political location of departments of religious studies in the US demands serious study and real engagement, if only to observe how power shunts dissent. Salvaging religious studies from being yet another casualty of this, the age of billionaire worship, may not be possible. But as its diminishment occurs, students of religion have no better exhibit of their scholarly subject.

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• The Bounds of Hierarchy: Mary Douglas

  2023-01-01

  other1st authorCorresponding
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• Exceptionally Queer: Mormon Peculiarity and US Nationalism by K. Mohrman (review)

  American Religion · 2023-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Exceptionally Queer: Mormon Peculiarity and US Nationalism by K. Mohrman Kathryn Lofton K. Mohrman, Exceptionally Queer: Mormon Peculiarity and US Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022). Few books enact critique with as much pertinacity as Exceptionally Queer. K. Mohrman argues a discursive trope, Mormon peculiarity, and tracks its persistence in public culture. Anyone who wants to think well about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and US history will not be able to do so without reference to this book. Mohrman's research begins with two suppositions: first, that the beginning of a new religion also begins a new discursive construction; second, that the single issue on which both LDS members and anti-Mormons agree is that "the Saints were a peculiar people" (23). The former is an insight that religionists, familiar with anti-Judaism and anti-Catholicism among many prejudicial discourses, would nod to hear. But as I reflected, I could not identify another citation that said this so clearly: religions emerge and, when these movements inaugurate, they produce ways of talking. Across LDS history, the Church's adherents have admitted and even admired their religion for its differences from majority beliefs and practices. To an equal degree, their antagonists not only deemed them ridiculous and dangerous but also deployed a subset of Mormon peculiarity discourse that defined and continues to affirm how America stays safe, secure, normal, white—in a word, exceptional. [End Page 199] Mormon peculiarity discourse framed Mormonism in different ways at different moments. In the mid-nineteenth century it racialized Saints through accusations of race treason, "propelling the construction of 'Mormons' as a new racial category distinct from white non-Mormon Americans" (36). Later, it marked Mormonism as a "hopelessly homophobic and backward religion," and consequently situated the Church as "a foil against which the US nation-state is represented as accepting and tolerant of sexual diversity" (4). Peculiarity discourse switched what it emphasized about Mormon specificity but persistently set Mormons as an exhibit of what Americans must abjure to assert their triumphal relationship to world history. Mormon peculiarity is a "discursive construction of that tradition as itself a racializing civilizational assemblage" that, being so constructed, recenters "the production and management of unexceptional . . . queer subjects" (305). As students of queer theory have long taught, talk about queerness is not about weirdness as much as it is about the reproduction of normativity. What is unexceptional about these queer subjects, the Latter-day Saints, is how their racialization and sexualization serve "biopolitical nationalism and empire in the United States" (11). Calling something queer immediately implies a norm it doesn't meet. Whether because of their commitment to family or the Church Welfare Program, whether for their modest dress or their devout patriotism, their interlocutors figured Mormons as peculiar because of "their whiteness and their Americanness," Mohrman repeats (157). To prove this point, Mohrman travels across the history of Mormonism's public perception, seeing how they went from being called peculiar in the nineteenth century for their accused sexual deviancy and racial inferiority to, more recently, being called peculiar because of their almost oddly normal "gender relations, sexual practices, familial organization, and, therefore, their racial status" (185). In their ongoing racialization, Mormons changed from being appraised as racially inferior to being fundamentally American. Who authors this racial shift, Mormons or non-Mormons? The first chapters in Exceptionally Queer underline that being exceptional for Mormons was an imperative of their political theology. Early Saints described the United States as exceptional because its government provided religious freedom, the "necessary condition . . . for the restoration of the true Church on the North American continent" (26). The Church had no investment in the representative government that accompanied this constitutional right, except as that government allowed the true Church to flourish. By the twentieth century, Mohrman concludes, LDS peculiarity discourse was an "important driver in the evolution of white supremacy's survival as a fundamental component of U.S. nationalism and [End Page 200] imperial policy" (235). She argues that this history led to consistent LDS complicity with white supremacy. As Mormons became complimented and admired for their support of family values, they did not become more conservative...

  PublisherDOI

• A Brief History of the Mormon Smile

  Journal of Mormon History · 2023-06-27

  article1st authorCorresponding

  No one likes a frowning face.Change it for a smile.Make the world a better placeBy smiling all the while.1The day before I presented the Smith-Pettit lecture at the 2022 meeting of the Mormon History Association at Utah State University, I entered the Eccles Center and ran into someone who asked me if I was the person speaking about the missionary grin. I quickly corrected him, “No, on the Mormon smile.” Missionary grin seemed to me an epithet, implying a smile with a mischievous or sly intonation.2 But this interlocutor wouldn't accept my correction. “No, no, my Dad always said it, he hated that missionary grin,” he asserted. After shaking my hand firmly, he moved on with, yes, a broad smile.This interaction underlines how the author enters this subject without confidence that she possesses the right language.3 I am neither LDS nor an expert in Mormonism. I am, instead, a historian of religion and student of popular culture, interested in what thinking about Mormonism reveals about broader social facts. In a 2013 forum on Mormonism for the journal Religion and American Culture, I developed a typology of Mormon representation in popular culture. After surveying fictional and nonfictional depictions of Mormon characters, I found that Mormons appeared in pop visage as primitive, as chaste, as pioneers, and as crippled figures. At the end of this examination, I arrived at a depiction I labeled uncanny: The uncanny Mormon is the Mormon that seems very relatable, yet suggests through their very cheer, efficiency, and wellness that something is off. The uncanny Mormon is discomforting, though it's hard to pinpoint exactly why. On a surface level, the uncanny Mormon is the face of Mormonism as the corporate entity that produced “7 Habits” guru Stephen R. Covey, cheerful temple tour guides, and patriarchic family portraits of campaigning politicians. In popular culture, one could point to American Idol runner-up David Archuleta or all-time Jeopardy winner Ken Jennings, both of whom were pioneer Mormons in their moral success yet still inspired many an online commentator to suggest that something seemed awkward about their consistent goodwill. In the realm of fiction, Brady Udall's novel The Lonely Polygamist (2010) and the HBO series Big Love deploy the uncanny Mormon to exemplary effect, pressing the reader (or viewer) to think about the relationship between the apparent and the real. The uncanny Mormon is a powerful provocation to wonder not merely at Mormonism, but also at the surfaces that maintain our own lives.4Implied in this paragraph is that what is most uncanny about these Mormons is their smile. Mormons are cheerful, and cheer appears on a face most legibly in that expression. The smile is something socially read as upbeat but also, given the troubles in the world—much less the troubles being holy in this world—it can be read as perhaps hiding something. Maybe the achievement of that smile included more strain than ease.In this essay I pursue from whence the Mormon smile comes. Historicizing an expression is complicated since our records for physicality are limited to second-order depictions, such as paintings or poems. The historicizing challenge is further intensified by a prejudicial eye. As the 2013 survey of pop representations suggested, the public understands Mormons with no small bias, imagining them ever chaste or deformed by devotion. The best way to correct for etic appraisal is to learn from emic voices. And the tradition seems to recommend it. “Helping somebody else smile not only makes that person feel happy but also makes you feel happy too,” reads an exercise in a 2013 issue of the Friend, the monthly children's magazine published by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “It's like giving a piece of candy to a friend and then getting two pieces back immediately. Plus, spreading smiles around is easier than you might think.”5 The Friend reminds its readers what mutual good a smile is, so good that the author likens it to an exponential sucrose. For the Friend, a smile would be good to see everywhere, as observed onscreen in the armies of yellow ever-smiling Minions in the Despicable Me media franchise, a story coauthored by Mormons.6 These two pieces of evidence—an article in a children's magazine, and a smiling visuality created by LDS members—offer evidence about smiles from Mormon culture.Such instances emerge from children's experiences—from their church education and cartoon entertainments. What becomes then of adults educated into Mormon smiling? A 2022 New Yorker profile of Sam Taggart, LDS founder of the D2D Association, a trade association for door-to-door salesmen, aligns the history of door-to-door sales with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Missionaries and salespersons are, in this rendering, near synonyms. “Everything is selling,” Taggart is quoted as saying. “You find the person's problem—‘My skin isn't good’ or ‘I got broken into’ or ‘I don't believe in anything’—and you solve it through your product.”7 It does not matter if your problem is rosacea or spiritual heartache, the salesman is a category of person able to serve. In his self-help advocacies of the salesperson's life as a universal metonym for how to engage other people's problems, Taggart supplies advice about how to engage what Erving Goffman described as the interaction order.8 For instance, here is what Taggart does after rapping on the door of a suburban home: “To reassure the customer that you're not a threat, you angle your body to appear smaller and gaze at your iPad. Then you look up and smile—but not before you catch the customer's eye, because that looks creepy.” Because that looks creepy. The author of the profile relates how Taggart operationalizes his sales self in physical form. Don't be a threat. How to do that? Smile, but naturally. Describing the not-creepy smile that Taggart uses to sell products, it is impossible not to consider how centrally Mormonism placed smiles in their visual repertoire and how this election marked Mormons more elusively than the habit hopes. It is hard to discern if that smile is real or fake. It is therefore hard to decide if Taggart is a good or bad guy. And in that wobble—the wondering which someone is—a prejudicial assumption is inlaid that they are indiscernible, and therefore creepy.This essay inaugurates from an assumption that Mormons deploy smiles as a requisite social accessory and an assertion that smiles do not offer a clear hermeneutic. Smiles confuse people. Does she like me? Did they smile at me? Is he happy to see me? Once you see a smile, the work begins, deciding if it is creepy or not, uncanny or not, false or true. “Many religious groups in America have developed their own characteristic emotional standards and expectations or, in shorthand, emotional “styles,” historian of religion John Corrigan writes. “Religious institutions authorize, protect, and police those styles.”9 Visual culture has an insistent role in deciding how people think about what religion is and can be. Tina Post writes about deadpan in culture, in the of offer instances expectations are to social Corrigan and religious pressing Mormons into the Corrigan on the work of historian their as an American religious Mormons the of the and that through their the LDS church the emotional culture of Mormonism by the of the described by a of Mormon in church emotional were from Mormon the of was and was like still in that the church to of Mormonism that the of Mormonism not it of is this essay in the the of the missionary grin and in the that this of smile. this essay on smiling as a subject of social smiling as a of religious visual smiling as a to LDS culture. underlines that smiling with no for the It is not a of a as as it is a of A smile is an of how it is to be in more than Mormons smile more perhaps than other religious or groups not only what they think about their but also what it is they as to this in history as the of and on their Because of their the to smile more than as a of with their and their of produced a of that in the a in found smiling to be a in A a in a could be by the of she the in and by the of instances she These one of the social for that if they with a they are as no smiling because smiles have such are for interaction in all social are people smiling as being more than that smiling are as more and than In they are more and more and from than people who do not smile. be as less than that of smiling to be evidence suggests that in the be true. of the of smiling and in smiling to of of The of culture by that a on the smiles at they that the is of a popular about that smiling at is by as a of is not a but a and smile as and it such as and and with the most and of these is of the in which he to a and smile as with a of something in in an that Mormon religious and the of as their to an and the with to with an of At the about of who are and and who are or in history how a smile is not always as the of evidence the social in the smiling are more than are as more and At the as they the of and smiling is one of the most The challenge is how to engage the by the or of am I smiling I look at I am smiling to your I see you up and I am for the of you do a and I how you are in your I think of something good from before and I smile to I smile at something that reminds me of that at the I am smiling because I feel a smile is the good on my am I smiling I look at I am smiling to be in your I see you up and I the of you do the you always me you are in I think of how you me as you and I a I correct my face you do not I am not I am smiling because I it's how you feel a smile is a to your a for you to and feel with have a of to how discern smiles or something that smiles a smile only the being an smile a also the and the of the the has that to other of smiles are a more of then The smile has with a and smile, to be so because it is the one that your the up with the of social and less I am how Mormon as in this the with a that is a of from both Mormon and in LDS Church founder a as the of to Did what he Did he feel religious Did his his suggests the of such religious as as those of As she Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day has and as his on the work of to the of the as the church to its and its In this the and the of the and a of the the Mormon Church has its own for the story this of a in an in as a of the religious of the church as a the of is not a of but a of a is no this is a real into the LDS in has a of to the and what look for a smile or a person or a a is as the that the real self is the self a self from and that to be marked by the and consistent of I readers to think about they are in this you think can find the you think that self is best with between the and the you think are a and as a of you think that such can the of a a this I for David essay on the of in the of makes clear that in a can be more of religious education than of was to a people could with the between and and between and and they could think through the of between and is something that a of pop and no small of our religious What is from all that A that after about an or life they a to between smiles from that being to to What this is that people who have have a other people than those who have not The more a person has like a social the better they at the might makes a that are more to be of something in of them is or someone is or not not a but a of after the of religious and in Mormon history as they do in and in his of for at the at on in Mormon culture, as would be as as from that found in other reveals about the that suggests Mormons were not as as other after was for the of in or of the success of the Church on the was no with Mormons who a of so are they of further and so are they about their of in religious and paintings and and temple the in and The history of by is less and less As historian of smiling seems at with the of the religion as in the and and Jesus but no one in the of religious though smiling does in The of a of it as the of and the of the the of It about the for about of the and of the makes for as a for the but the of the and the of and smiling to work their way into But in of the and of the a smile is not the of in the that smile is the for all social would our has is the smile is not so as it is a social the novel and the is a social history of and that how the smile to a smile and and standards that that the be The in in the to a small The smile characteristic of because of and the visual in to and the with social if they not with a For that bad to a of these found success through an on the As as the the a who as for of and with a the seemed to of from writes a of the for life in the of the American and in and to the in the and smile to in a happy the was with a smile which was by a in is for on from the the smile in a of other they then the smiles by a to the smile of the smile of smiles from and asked to whom those smiles smile in the a of and It also a of and to the of the by a of confidence and historian John of and an of American life and an emotional the the smile was to popular culture. 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I to Mormons to to the world of their cheerful might it not be because the popular has them as Mormons see as of American and family might it not be because they to the in the that was of and Mormons at might it not be because they to for the their the American of the a social to the smiling In is the the and the suburban Mormon appear to is a to be what they for than smiling as a to a or a the of smiling as something they do to what they in that better than the troubles that way to your other is to Mormonism included a smile of its pressing a smile into the history of as a of how and the physical they In Latter-day smile appears only a but in the of smiling something else a world The have the The The hand of you most At the Jesus appears to the in the New he smiles is Mormon the the the hand of to smile, and they they something or the of The of as a In a of a the and smiling and its pioneer of these have smiling and In the Latter-day on the in and how this a on them by he all these was and he on a smile the and said this was the for the of the A is with John in of the to a that the smile and of the in on this evidence is the of smiling as a is, in the Mormon something it is something that can it is something people can to their own But it is neither nor I the paintings of Mormon and and find I find a of smiling of Mormons in their culture, but this only with the history that after the with and was smiling more on the then for the missionary grin that of of of The or the smile that in his of a Mormon The with the in smiling so that the of his face to the grin. a in the smile seems a I smile like that his the story of how he and found his smile as he and the LDS is the smile an of relationship to his Mormon in and that the Mormon smile is a to the a of how Mormons in the to their to a public that entered this with of them as and that they were in the of the After Mormons to as described Utah in as the of who the and institutions of the as as other LDS to a of Mormons as and As to Mormons in the happy of for the Mormon at the of the LDS Church to and read the American culture for what pieces of it they could to public prejudicial the broader public the church is or the church with the of a that in to of the broader public the church with the church with was door-to-door the broader public suggests is something about LDS then Mormon an to suggest but David of the church from to not to a he the and history of the church with the the one founder was the not to a that with and a with of Utah to like and the someone with a for the that a of to his for of media is and becomes the of the Mormon a of the of the of the LDS the how Mormon institutions such as public not through as as the of a Mormon in which the church the look and of the American by on and a the in the of the and from the the and the also a of for all produced in the from to to a of these the of in that the of and moral the church for a of which included how one and As the to the and its LDS to and than their and their expectations for historian that church their between right and of moral and social of those like and and the church to religious education through in the and a The of these was and the of people in from to and the of from to Mormon the in and and for The church seemed to offer a its to a of the its can be found in after the its on the Big with an about what a and his they the was to the church as from to he was like was the and is But were other social The that a the a and it that the in church one of a of that a of on the and one of or so of and are but the look of all the is, as their on still and The in the American to that the the church is the In the LDS is not is the is an not only on physical and writes John also on the in the be to the the I the history of the Mormon smile, I found it not with as she the smile of but with missionary As the smile the of the corporate and the Mormon smile as a of that smile. The LDS was to the Mormon smile was no as but a smile, hiding to to be smiling and and in public in a of and As an of the church are to are entered an their was a door in their The Mormon smile as a of is an subject and one that in a and without evidence of how their door-to-door and requisite the Mormon smile is a of Mormon and social perhaps the smile is also a that these Mormon were not they as of the to be the best of a social that as its I of I on the social of smiles with which this essay which that smile for their does the missionary they are not by the how their Mormon missionary was as about the as it was about the into a corporate has its writes. the of the and to and church as by the Mormons not only by and but also, and and from those they is Mormon through the smile. The person the at who smiles at a through their smile, who feel because it seems the are happy in corporate But the smile does for the the missionary as a are you smiling after I the door in your The smile of that missionary can be read as the smile of someone to smile by corporate it could be read as the smile of a person for whom the door is of the of their a of a But in the of or fictional of Mormon missionary I into because I found a with of on that suggests is not the to think about thinking about the Mormon and produced by and their as at the of its and and of whom is not an church and is not with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It is a by the of with that of the LDS missionary his on to as the best for real LDS the of public to the missionary at to a of self the missionary is in its not to is in this to the offer a and about the missionary life The in it are visual representations of LDS missionary of and good but without The seems by an to a on the of people to be The is as the to think about the between and through the of between with that of two to not the of being a who is also from the At I can that you for your But it don't it you the yet the “To you for your with a of they to you about who to they to offer with your they to you don't have or more about their but the that you to be and you to be seems less an than a to and you because you think you but how can have a of for the be ever because it's that and to it with you see it, you not, ever missionary is a you from the other have a to see the have the best to with you about you me it with The in a after the are, by a from the piece of can you our to if you read this you see the The good isn't for It you to is a of the real. one and am I smiling at Because this our found someone with whom to it. in and said like to our way of our way of and right at a After so after so many and after so history of and to the as the a real And the with them with their and what can only be a of Mormon

  PublisherDOI

• Cancel Culture and Other Myths: Anti-fandom as heartbreak

  The Yale Review · 2023 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Media studies

  Cancel Culture and Other MythsAnti-fandom as heartbreak Kathryn Lofton (bio) A friend is about to give a guest lecture. She is paralyzingly nervous: "I don't want to get canceled." A colleague who is about to have an editorial published asks me to make sure there is nothing cancelable in it. When their work occurs without incident, I return to the terror that preceded their success. "You see, you weren't canceled!" "Thank god," they both reply, an oddly unifying utterance for two professed nontheists. The stakes of canceling are such that disbelievers reach for higher powers when spared. I begin to ask everyone I meet what they think of when they think of cancel culture. A student tells me her grandparents [End Page 161] complain, "It's Salem all over again." A friend tells me of a colleague who got fired for something they said on Slack. "Can you believe it?" she snaps. "Cancel culture ruins lives." I gather these instances and wonder whether cancel culture is an encroaching menace against which everyone must defend or a moral panic that inflates the problem. In a 2023 paper published in Political Studies, Pippa Norris poses the question this way: "Do claims about a growing 'cancel culture' curtailing free speech on college campuses reflect a pervasive myth, fueled by angry partisan rhetoric, or do these arguments reflect social reality?"1 Norris finds that contemporary academics may be less willing to speak up due to a fear of cancel culture. Cancel culture is not a myth, Norris decides, because, in silencing people, it does something real. There is no question that cancel culture is real. It is also a myth. Taking myths as real requires resistance to conventional usage. Seven myths about COVID-19 vaccines, yells one headline. Ten mega myths about sex, beckons another. Myth used this way refers to an idea people believe that is not true. This is a relatively recent connotation of myth. In the history of religion, myths are stories people tell about forces more powerful than them described as superhuman. A superhuman force could be a god; it could be meteorology; it could be a corporation or a foreign state. Myths occur when human beings want to explain how mysterious things come to pass. Their explanation is: "Something more powerful than us did something to make this happen." Cancel culture produces a collection of myths within a particular tradition or a mythology. Depending on your political inclinations, the cast of gods and heroes alters considerably. The question is what mystery cancel culture's mythology explains. Thinking about this requires thinking a little about religion, and a lot about what hurts people most. The history of religions is a history of organizing power relations. If this premise isn't especially sexy to you, I commend the many Netflix films about religion where you can watch charismatic figures lull followers with promises of new dawns and off-the-grid [End Page 162] togetherness. A lot of people who Netflix and chill do not identify religiously, but everybody knows a heartbreak authored by a devastating player. "Something in the way you move / Makes me feel like I can't live without you," sings Rihanna in "Stay," her 2012 blockbuster duet with Mikky Ekko. This is just one of hundreds of lovelorn tracks from the Top 40 that would serve well as a soundtrack for religion's depiction in Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey (2022), Unorthodox (2020), and Wild Wild Country (2018). Religion has a fair number of sexual mountebanks, but for a new religious movement to become an established religion, it needs to evolve from one-hit wonder to Beyoncé. New religious movements, sometimes derogatively called cults, offer ritual resolve for persons seeking solutions to their most profound questions and pain. Religions evolve from small cultic movements when, after the initial romance fades, individuals keep repeating things that other individuals repeat, and those communal repetitions come to constitute a form of belonging. If I say the Lord's Prayer, the Jewish blessing over bread, or the Muslim salat, I am speaking individually, but I am speaking in a way many other people speak, and when we hear...

  PublisherDOI

• Observational Secular

  2023-10-30

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Denominational Uncoupling in a Divestment Age

  2023-01-19 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter examines the fraught relationship between religiously founded universities and their current boards of trustees to show that market-driven secularization has not robbed these universities of moral intention but has rather shifted the grounds of their moral discernment. In the course of becoming a product in a higher education marketplace, university standards for discernment shifted to identifying their respective graduates with passing on a particular, luxury brand of socio-cultural status, not moral fitness. Thus, universities are caught, it argues, between a stated commitment to foster a more democratic society and the need to maintain financial viability and an exclusive brand through profitable investments in the marketplace. The chapter concludes with a case study on market-driven secularization in the context of conflicting arguments for and against asset divestment.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Laurie F. Maffly‐Kipp

  2 shared

• James Clifton

  Yale University

  1 shared

• Angie Heo

  Yale University

  1 shared

• Koichi Shinohara

  Yale University

  1 shared

• Gregory Levine

  1 shared

• Richard Flory

  1 shared

• Mary Ann Campbell

  1 shared

• Richard Mammana

  Yale University

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Poorvu Family Award for Interdisciplinary Teaching
• Sarai Ribicoff Award for the Encouragement of Teaching at Ya…
• Graduate Mentor Award in the Humanities