American Heresy uncovers the complex legacy of America's founding principles, demonstrating how the very same values have produced both good fruit and the bitter harvest of white Christian nationalism. Fanestil adeptly traces an early American story that reaches into our present with alarming immediacy. Using cogent examples from the earliest days of colonial settlement through the Revolutionary War era, Fanestil helps us understand how many of the principles we view as paradigmatic expressions of American identity have had contested histories from the start. Virtue has brought both self-sacrifice and extremism; progress, both cultural pride and white racism. The very same principles that underpin the United States' proudest moments also forged the white Christian nationalism that fruited so dangerously in the Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021. The implications of Fanestil's complex history are highly pertinent--and alarming. Far from a fringe movement embraced by a violent few, white Christian nationalism is a spiritual inheritance shared by all white American Christians. Grappling with this history is vital if the United States is ever to move beyond its tragic legacy as a white settler society.

A Call for Heresy discovers unexpected common ground in one of the most inflammatory issues of the twenty-first century: the deepening conflict between the Islamic world and the United States. Moving beyond simplistic answers, Anouar Majid argues that the Islamic world and the United States are both in precipitous states of decline because, in each, religious, political, and economic orthodoxies have silenced the voices of their most creative thinkers—the visionary nonconformists, radicals, and revolutionaries who are often dismissed, or even punished, as heretics. The United States and contemporary Islam share far more than partisans on either side admit, Majid provocatively argues, and this “clash of civilizations” is in reality a clash of competing fundamentalisms. Illustrating this point, he draws surprising parallels between the histories and cultures of Islam and the United States and their shortsighted suppression of heresy (zandaqa in Arabic), from Muslim poets and philosophers like Ibn Rushd (known in the West as Averros) to the freethinker Thomas Paine, and from Abu Bakr Razi and Al-Farabi to Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. He finds bitter irony in the fact that Islamic culture is now at war with a nation whose ideals are losing ground to the reactionary forces that have long condemned Islam to stagnation. The solution, Majid concludes, is a long-overdue revival of dissent. Heresy is no longer a contrarian’s luxury, for only through encouraging an engaged and progressive intellectual tradition can the nations reverse their decline and finally work together for global justice and the common good of humanity. Anouar Majid is founding chair and professor of English at the University of New England and the author of Freedom and Orthodoxy: Islam and Difference in the Post-Andalusian Age; Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World; and Si Yussef, a novel. He is also cofounder and editor of Tingis, a Moroccan-American magazine of ideas and culture.

This book explores the shifting and negotiated boundaries of religion, spirituality, and secular thinking in Britain and North America during the twentieth century. It contributes to a growing scholarship that problematises secularization theory, arguing that religion and spirituality increasingly took diverse new forms and identities, rather than simply being replaced by a monolithic secularity. The volume examines the way that thinkers, writers, and artists manipulated and reimagined orthodox belief systems in their work, using the notion of heresy to delineate the borders of what was considered socially and ethically acceptable. It includes topics such as psychospiritual approaches in medicine, countercultures and religious experience, and the function of blasphemy within supposedly secular politics. The book argues that heresy and heretical identities established fluid borderlands. These borderlands not only blur simple demarcations of the religious and secular in the twentieth century, but also infer new forms of heterodoxy through an exchange of ideas. This collection of essays offers a nuanced take on a topic that pervades the study of religion. It will be of great use to scholars of Heresy Studies, Religious Studies and Comparative Religion, Social Anthropology, History, Literature, Philosophy, and Cultural Studies.