This essay introduces a special issue of Nova Religio on magic and politics in the United States in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. The articles in this issue address a gap in the literature examining intersections of religion, magic, and politics in contemporary North America. They approach political magic as an essentially religious phenomenon, in that it deals with the spirit world and attempts to motivate human behavior through the use of symbols. Covering a range of practices from the far right to the far left, the articles argue against prevailing scholarly treatments of the use of esoteric technologies as a predominantly right-wing phenomenon, showing how they have also been operationalized by the left in recent history. They showcase the creativity of magic as a form of human cultural expression, and demonstrate how magic coexists with rationality in contemporary western settings.

Researching the paranormal frequently involves the study of how people discuss paranormal phenomena’s significance in popular culture. Using Victor Turner’s concept of the liminoid, in this article I survey The Simpsons ’ annual “Treehouse of Horror” episodes and suggest that thinking with these episodes can help scholars re-envision the academic construction of religion and the paranormal. I will argue that scholars should collapse the distinction between “religion” and “the paranormal” in academic and popular discussions.

This article addresses the geo-eschatological ideologies associated with Mormonism. Recent scholarship points to the significance of geopolitical thought within religion to society’s broader geopolitical inclinations. This article reports on a survey of 817 Mormon university students’ geographical/political/social expectations for the “Last Days.” Results show confidence in their church’s institutional and doctrinal roles, but ambivalence toward various geopolitically laden popular discourses in Mormonism and Christianity. American respondents have higher levels of certain types of ideological and geopolitical concern than do their Asian and Pacific Islander counterparts. Cleavages in respondents’ social and geopolitical thought show important associations with ideological variation.

This article addresses religious responses to disaster by examining how one network of conservative evangelical Christians reacted to the Haiti earthquake and the humanitarian relief that followed. The charismatic Christian New Apostolic Reformation (or Spiritual Mapping movement) is a transnational network that created the conditions for post-earthquake, internally displaced Haitians to arrive at two positions that might seem contradictory. On one hand, Pentecostal Haitian refugees used the movement’s conservative, right-wing theology to develop a punitive theodicy of the quake as God’s punishment of a sinful nation. On the other hand, rather than resign themselves to victimhood and passivity, their strict moralism allowed these evangelical refugees to formulate an uncompromising critique of the Haitian government, the United Nations peacekeeping mission, and foreign humanitarian relief. They rejected material humanitarian aid when possible and developed a stance of Christian self-sufficiency, anti-foreign-aid, and anti-dependency. They accepted visits only from American missionaries with “spiritual,” and not material, missions, and they launched their own missions to parts of Haiti unaffected by the quake.

The transnational turn has generated new ways of thinking about borders and phenomena that cross them, including religion. Nevertheless, there is little agreement on what kinds of processes the terms “transnationalism” and “globalization” refer to and to what extent they represent something new. As the articles in this special issue examine, however, these terms refer not simply to actual changes in geographical scale but to distinct ways of imagining the world and specific claims about how the world should be. This introduction discusses the ways that the contributors to this issue attend to the role that the transnational imagination plays in religious discourse and practice.

Aside from discussing the three articles in this special issue of Nova Religio on Religion and the Transnational Imagination, these brief comments aim to make a critical plea for conceptual clarification when it comes to what exactly the relatively novel, and arguably under-theorized term “transnational” might possibly mean when yoked to the historically old, but arguably equally problematic category, “religion.” My main argument is, if for different (though ultimately not altogether unrelated) reasons, both terms—at least as currently operationalized in much of the anthropology of religion, and religious studies more generally—not only fail to capture the social realities reported in the essays in this special issue, but also unhelpfully shore up a set of ideologies about the supposedly “novel” nature of our “globalized” human condition, that we might better rethink.