Religion, Emotion, and What Else?

John Corrigan

September 23, 2025

Jasper Johns, Map (1961). Oil on canvas. Museum of Modern Art, New York. 

As a doctoral student I suffered badly from Graduate Student Theory Disease, an affliction from which I am still recovering, two steps forward and one step back. My study of American religious history accordingly has from the beginning been infused with my own critical and experimental turnings of theories that I calculate will make historical data more legible to me. The spectrum of theory that I read has widened over the years to include work in many disciplines and, as I have advanced it, it has led me to new topics to write about in connection with religion. So, out of the gate, as a historian swimming in theory, I aimed to make sense of la longue duree of religion in America at the same time that I sought to bring theoretical clarity to the project of the study of religion as a whole. 

I settled on a dissertation topic that would allow me to explore those overlapping territories. In The Hidden Balance: Religion and the Social Theories of Charles Chauncy and Jonathan Mayhew (Cambridge University Press, 1987, 2006), I analyzed the thinking of those two New England clergymen with an eye to the rapidly changing social world of Revolutionary America. As leading voices for rebellion against England, Chauncy and Mayhew offered elaborately constructed conceptions of the role that emotions ought to play in resistance to political authority. I demonstrated how those two writers enmeshed their conceptions of emotion with religious ideas, and how in particular they borrowed from theological paradigms in concluding that emotion and reason were dialectically related and could be deployed together in moral fashion in resistance to oppressive social and political orders. Accordingly, the two men anointed a certain style of feeling—one that was characterized by flammability and bold expressiveness but was at the same time conceptualized as “rational” and disciplined—and encouraged its practice in public enactments of dissatisfaction with British rule. A central argument of the book, beyond the focus on the relation between reason and emotion, was that religion, politics, and socio-economic life all were intertwined in a worldview—one that yet was always tentative and shifting—and that each of those component areas could not be understood apart from the others. The project set the frame for a major part of my subsequent research agenda, one roughly summarized by the Times Literary Supplement in remarking on the book as an effort to demonstrate how religion seeks to "mediate a comprehensive map of the world."   

The book’s centering of emotion, and its relation to cognition, turned out to be a step in the right direction as far as the ascent of that topic over the nearly forty years since. So also the claim, steeped at that time in the peaking linguistic turn, that discourses of religion, politics, economics, and social order were interlocked and mutually constitutive. But so much was missing from that book. And as I recognized how I had only skimmed the surface of the emotional lives of eighteenth-century historical actors, I set out to answer some of the issues that the book had raised but failed to resolve. The first of these was apparent in my overlooking emotional practice as embodied experience. Although I had written about the physical performances of emotion in revival meetings, I had neglected to appreciate the extent of raw emotional agency in public enactments of feeling. In a follow-up book, I began to slip from the clutches of the linguistic turn and to recognize embodiment, in this case the physical experience of affect and how eighteenth-century American writers, as part of a broader Enlightenment, also had begun to recognize that aspect of feeling when they assayed religion.

I had not yet figured out how to write about gender in relation to emotion and body. I understood that class, race, and gender had a lot to do with emotional styles. I had written lightly about class in the first book, but the topic of gender seemed most pressing. So, I set out to describe the emotional lives of nineteenth-century men and women, attending especially to how men’s performances of emotion in revival settings were conditioned by an emergent capitalist socio-economic system that portrayed emotion as a commodity, staging it as an object that might be exchanged for other valuable objects, such as God’s favor. In presenting the case for that, I refined my analysis of the relationship between reason—in this case “rational choice”—and emotion, and wove religion more tightly with economy, politics, and social order. I also wrote a bit about white construction of African-American emotionality. So, there was incremental progress, on several fronts, in broadening the agenda redolent in the first book, filling in some of the holes in that book. And it seemed to me that I was making progressively clearer the centrality of emotion to the history of religion in America. 

Up to that point, then, I had written broadly about emotion in American Christianities but had not really investigated—not really tested—whether my approach could hold together if I were to track the life of a single emotion through American religious history. I thought to go in that direction by exploring the place of an emotion, which I named the feeling of emptiness, across different periods of American religious history. That book turned out to be more of an inventory of the ways such a feeling was deeply lodged in American Christian cultures, but it also opened more plainly a way forward for historical argumentation that made emotion, and not ideology, the starting point and the focal point for a history of Christianity in America.  

Of course, a detailed analysis of race still was missing. But I was making progress in understanding how I might address that deficit. I had moved departments, from Religious Studies to American Studies, partly because I believed that the most exciting work on race and class was located in the latter. And also, because my tendency to traverse disciplines and fields that was evidenced in my first books had hardened into an imperative. American Studies as a resolutely interdisciplinary field was a good fit, then, for those two reasons. So, while working on other projects on religion and space, and religious violence, I continued to think about race, and, eventually, figured out a way to write about it in connection with religion and feelings. That project (The Feeling of Forgetting: Christianity, Race, and Violence in America [Chicago University Press, 2023]) was a stridently interdisciplinary venture that further clarified my view of the interrelationships between cognition, affect, and memory, and how those interrelationships played out over time for some American Christians anxious about the “nation.” I made a case for the religiously-facilitated repression of traumatic feelings in both whites and Blacks. That was a serious step toward rectifying my neglect of that topic in that first book about the eighteenth century. 

In retrospect then, what has become one important strand of my research—religion and emotion in America—was  foreshadowed in my first book. Clearly, that book was rudimentary. I would write it differently now: to include all of these other topics and much better theory. The zig-zag line of my research in this particular area over the years has been marked by my periodic recommitment to some of the themes in that first book (e.g., emotion, culture, power), but also by an ongoing process of asking “What else?” And there remains much more “else,” not the least of which is how to think about the shared emotional foundations of religion and nation, a project I explored preliminarily in a recent book and about which I currently am writing more expansively. Hopefully, that project will join together all of these themes—religion, emotion, body, ideology, race, gender, class, and nation—in a way that more closely approximates a historical view of a “map of the world” of American religion. But, like a first book, that map, as Jasper Johns knew, will remain rich with ambiguity and obliquity—that is, with potentiality.