At Home and Abroad is a stimulating collection of essays that explores domestic, transnational, and imperial connections between religious practices in the United States and religious communities throughout the world. The authors seek to show that the diversity of religion in the United States contributed to religious and national identities abroad, forging a new understanding of how religion has shaped, and been shaped by, foreign and domestic politics in the United States.
Part history, part literary theory, and part biography, the essays are broad and wide-ranging, covering Hawaii, the Philippines, South Africa, Palestine, and the United States, among other countries. The editors assert in their Introduction that, rather than viewing the United States as a space that practices “the free market of religion” (4), American leaders have always “exported” religion with a purpose, whether through evangelizing by Mormons or Protestant Christians or providing support for countries that enslaved Muslims and...
University of California Press