About

Tisa Wenger is a historian whose work explores the intersections of religion, race, and empire in American history. Her research focuses on how settler colonialism has shaped American religious traditions and the concept of religious freedom, examining how these ideas have been used to marginalize indigenous practices and reinforce racial and political hierarchies. Wenger's notable contributions include the book 'Spirits of Empire,' which analyzes how the history of American religion is rooted in settler colonial foundations and introduces the concept of 'settler secularism,' and 'Religion and US Empire,' a comprehensive history of the relationship between American religion and imperialism from the eighteenth century to the present. She also authored 'We Have a Religion,' which investigates the Pueblo Indian dance controversy and its implications for indigenous religious freedom, demonstrating how Euro-American notions of religion have historically marginalized Native American traditions. Wenger's scholarship is characterized by its conceptual clarity, detailed archival research, and its focus on how religious ideas serve political and social interests, making a profound contribution to understanding the ongoing entanglements of religion, race, and empire in the United States.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• History
• Law
• Philosophy
• Art
• Archaeology
• Ancient history
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• Editor’s Note

  Method & Theory in the Study of Religion · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Philosophy
  • Epistemology

  We as editors did not conceive or organize the articles that follow as a thematically defined special issue.And yet, several key questions for the study of religion weave across and through these pieces.In their differences as well as their points of agreement, we find these assembled articles useful to think with about some of the current contours of religious studies as a field.Several of these articles ask readers to revisit key terms or renovate older tropes in the study of religion.As an opening gambit, Daniel Enstedt and Jessica Moberg propose recuperating the concept of "animism" through a performative approach that, they contend, may help us move beyond the religious/ secular and modern/pre-modern divides that so persistently plague the study of religion.François Gauthier and James Spickard push in a different direction, offering a revised critique of rational choice theory from within the discipline of economics itself.They conclude that a robust approach to economic exchange may yet provide useful insights for the study of religion.Rounding out this trio, and equally arguing against the current disciplinary grain, Joseph Streeter contends that religious studies can and must recuperate the notion of "belief" if it is to understand how all human beings imagine, organize, and make sense of our worlds.A second set of articles think more explicitly about how (religious) traditions are constituted and the kinds of work that religious studies ought to do.Pushing back indirectly against Streeter's call to focus on belief, David Nikkel challenges critical theories of religion to move away from their preoccupation with discourse to better see the "affective and aesthetic bodily engagements" that constitute all tradition.Jesper Petersen and Anders Ackfeldt propose the concept of "non-Muslim Islam" -the definition of Islam by non-Muslimsto better understand how both non-Muslim and Muslim identifications are formed.This approach, they suggest, may offer equally valuable insights into how outsiders to every tradition produce particular varieties of these traditions, defining "Christianity," for example, in ways that many Christians may not recognize but, nonetheless, impact the ways in which Christians identify and navigate their worlds.And last but certainly not least, Russell McCutcheon argues for the current relevance of his now-classic work Manufacturing Religion, published (already) twenty-five years ago.As McCutcheon concluded

  DOI

• Modernists, Pueblo Indians, and the Politics of Primitivism

  University of Arizona Press eBooks · 2022 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Art
  • History
  DOI

• Church, State, and “Native Liberty” in the Belgian Congo

  Comparative Studies in Society and History · 2020 · 1 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  Abstract This essay describes a religious freedom controversy that developed between the world wars in the Belgian colony of the Congo, where Protestant missionaries complained that Catholic priests were abusing Congolese Protestants and that the Belgian government favored the Catholics. The history of this campaign demonstrates how humanitarian discourses of religious freedom—and with them competing configurations of church and state—took shape in colonial contexts. From the beginnings of the European scramble for Africa, Protestant and Catholic missionaries had helped formulate the “civilizing” mission and the humanitarian policies—against slavery, for free trade, and for religious freedom—that served to justify the European and U.S. empires of the time. Protestant missionaries in the Congo challenged the privileges granted to Catholic institutions by appealing to religious freedom guarantees in colonial and international law. In response, Belgian authorities and Catholic missionaries elaborated a church-state arrangement that limited “foreign” missions in the name of Belgian national unity. Both groups, however, rejected Native Congolese religious movements—which refused the authority of the colonial church(es) along with the colonial state—as “political” and so beyond the bounds of legitimate “religion.” Our analysis shows how competing configurations of church and state emerged dialogically in this colonial context and how alternative Congolese movements ultimately challenged Belgian colonial rule.

  DOI

Frequent coauthors

• Sylvester A. Johnson

  2 shared

• Sheri Prud’homme

  Starr King School for the Ministry

  1 shared

• Dan McKanan

  Episcopal Divinity School

  1 shared

• Josef Sorett

  Howard University

  1 shared

• Gale L. Kenny

  1 shared

• E Monos

  1 shared

• Paul J. Vanderwood

  1 shared

• P. D. A. Harvey

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Guggenheim Fellowship

Similar researchers at Yale University

• Mark Gersteinh-217
• Liangbing Huh-172
• Akiko Iwasakih-145
• Alan Kazdinh-142
• Douglas L. Rothmanh-125