About Uncivil Religion

Uncivil Religion: January 6, 2021 is a digital resource created through a collaboration of the University of Alabama's Department of Religious Studies and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

The project is directed by Michael J. Altman and Jerome Copulsky. Peter Manseau, Director of the Center for Understanding Religion in American History at the National Museum of American History, serves as project advisor. Religious Studies graduate students from the REL 502: Public Humanities and Religious Studies course in the Fall of 2021 provided research and digital expertise to the project. The REL Digital Lab, within the Department of Religious Studies, and eTech, within the College of Arts and Sciences, at the University of Alabama provided technical resources, consulting, and support.

Michael J. Altman is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. He specializes in American religious history, theory and method in the study of religion, and Asian religions in America. He is also the director of American Examples, a series of workshops in research, teaching, and public humanities for early career scholars of religion in America, and the editor of the American Examples  anthology series with the University of Alabama Press. He researches and teach courses about the category “religion” in American history and culture. More specifically, he uses examples of religion in America to explore larger questions about how people and groups use “religion” to separate “us” from “them.” His first book, Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu: American Representations of India, 1721-1893 (Oxford University Press, 2017) examined a variety of ways Americans used representations of religion in India to argue over what counted as American at home. He has published other articles and book chapters on Asian religions in America, religion in film, podcasting in religious studies, and American evangelicalism. Altman earned a B.A. from the College of Charleston, an M.A. from Duke University, and a Ph.D. from Emory University.

Jerome Copulsky is a consulting scholar at the National Museum of American History’s Center for the Understanding of Religion in American History. He is a research fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs, specializing in modern Western religious thought, political theory, and church/state issues. His scholarly work has been published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the Journal of Religion, Political Theology, and Perspectives on Political Science, and in Political Theology for a Plural Age (2013) and Judaism, Liberalism, and Political Theology (2013). His writing has also appeared in The Atlantic, Washingtonian, The Forward, Jerusalem Post, Jewish Review of Books, The Christian Century, and Religion Dispatches.

This project was supported by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation.