Jennifer Graber

Focusing on the intersection of Christianity and politics in the American penitentiary system, Jennifer Graber explores evangelical Protestants' efforts to make religion central to emerging practices and philosophies of prison discipline from the 1790s through the 1850s.

Initially, state and prison officials welcomed Protestant reformers' and ministers' recommendations, particularly their ideas about inmate suffering and redemption. Over time, however, officials proved less receptive to the reformers' activities, and inmates also opposed them. Ensuing debates between reformers, officials, and inmates revealed deep disagreements over religion's place in prisons and in the wider public sphere as the separation of church and state took hold and the nation's religious environment became more diverse and competitive. Examining the innovative New York prison system, Graber shows how Protestant reformers failed to realize their dreams of large-scale inmate conversion or of prisons that reflected their values. To keep a foothold in prisons, reformers were forced to relinquish their Protestant terminology and practices and instead to adopt secular ideas about American morals, virtues, and citizenship. Graber argues that, by revising their original understanding of prisoner suffering and redemption, reformers learned to see inmates' afflictions not as a necessary prelude to a sinner's experience of grace but as the required punishment for breaking the new nation's laws.

This paper draws on literary scholar Susan Ryan’s work to show how Americans worked out national as well as racial identities through benevolent activity, including forms of reformative incarceration. Reformers operated as true citizens by sustaining themselves and providing for others. Recipients, on the other hand, functioned as people in need. Ryan argues that benevolent activists ascribed need to entire groups of people. As a result, “the categories of blackness, Indianness, and Irishness…came to signify need itself.” Elite Americans thereby “raced” need, assigning essential difference to populations they sought to relieve. Ryan’s work on racialized need can help us understand the connections between Christianity, race, and mass incarceration. I explore how one nineteenth-century military prison—and the disciplinary institutions later modeled on it—was created in direct response to presumed (and raced) need among Native Americans. I also consider how Christian reformers obscured and concealed the racialized nature of this institution—and how, in that avoidance, they came to sanctify mass incarceration for racial minorities. Finally, I look at two incarcerated Native artists’ drawings to show how people caught up in racialized renderings of their need have something else to say about who they are and what prison is.

This essay considers the ways in which racial violence in the nineteenth century proved formative to developments in the religious lives of people raced outside of whiteness. It draws on borderlands scholar Luís León’s description of marginalized communities transforming existing religious concepts and practices, as well as creating new religious options, a process he calls religious poetics. It also suggests the critical importance of debating and enacting racial violence for members of communities raced white. These actors engaged in a poetics of racial violence, in which they sought to interpret and reconfigure their worlds in relation to the violence that perpetuated America’s racial order. The essay surveys justifications for and condemnations of racial violence, as well as responses to racial violence, in an effort to explore how religion and violence intersected in the ongoing development of racial classifications and the circulation of social power in nineteenth-century America.

This article explores Kiowa sai-gut or calendars produced in the 1880s and 1890s to show how makers used material culture to represent new ritual practices as both broadly indigenous and particularly Kiowa. Using calendars as one form of Kiowa cultural expression, the article explores how Kiowas navigated their reservation’s changing religious landscape. Building on literature in American Indian studies that emphasizes native agency and activity in this period, the article suggests that scholars of American religions can look to forms of material culture as ways to track American Indian religious life in this period.